How Samsung's VR Headset Convinced John Carmack to Join Oculus VR
engadget.com
engadget.com
Wow, I really have to admire his patience. While reading this I was even thinking "They are arguing with John Carmack about what he needs to get the graphics right? Who do they think they are?!" and I am not him. I would never have the patience for this. That must be like my grandma arguing with me about programming.
Millions of people upgraded their computers from 1996-2001 almost exclusively to play his games. He's probably responsible for more sold NVIDIA and Intel chips than any single person outside those companies.
On the software development side, you know there was an interesting thing at E3, one of the interviews I gave, I had mentioned something about how I’ve been learning a whole lot, and I’m a better programmer now than I was a year ago and the interviewer expressed a lot of surprise at that, you know after 20 years and going through all of this that you’d have it all figured out by now, but I actually have been learning quite a bit about software development, both on the personal craftsman level but also paying more attention by what it means on the team dynamics side of things.
https://blogs.uw.edu/ajko/2012/08/22/john-carmack-discusses-...
He also developed megatextures for Rage. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/MegaTexture
EDIT: interesting, getting downvoted because I wasn't impressed by Carmack's later productions?
The problem is that there just isn't a way to ship the data set right now that you need to support it properly. The hardware is there, the infrastructure is not.
They really needed to ship several hundred gigs of textures to do it justice. Right now you can't realistically deliver that to players.
Now certainly basing a game off a technology that isn't ready for prime time is a mistake, but the technology itself is very impressive and the underlying concept will come back when the internet is fast enough that you can realistically expect someone to download a half terabyte game.
Well I agree with your statement, but I'm not sure the tech is worth it in the end. The current tech is advancing faster than the Megatexture one, and by the time the Megatexture becomes a reality again, we won't need it anymore. Look at all games coming out in 1 to 2 years, they look fantastic while still relying on traditional texture concepts.
On a side note, it did not help to sell the technology that Rage was a notoriously bad game (just like Doom3, but hey, it's not a popular opinion apparently not to like having monsters jumping at you right when you open a door).
And although I agree that as games Doom 3 and Rage were just OK, Carmack is known for his tech; I don't think he gets involved on the game design side.
Wow. That puts it not too long after the Oculus Rift kickstarter, which was in October 2012. I wonder how the Gear project came to start. Were there some graphics enthusiasts with moving power at Samsung that went "this. we need to get on this"?
It is called "the screen". Samsumg manufactures(mass produces) the best screens in the world. Their OLED screens are the best quality, simple, lightweight and extremely fast response.
Oculus needs Samsung screens. Samsumg needs oculus talent, so they are partners.
While there are hassles of VR with Android that were only solved by making deep changes to Android, the hassles of PC are greater. And this is a phone accessory that is specifically not designed for changing hardware and software: it only works with the Note 4 running a custom optimized version of Android. But they do agree with you that a dedicated unit is what they want to do as well which is why this is not their own consumer unit.
Also they have a direct line with the phone manufacturer for the display technology and with this strategy of tying in with the mobile world, they can potentially get into a loop of rapidly updating hardware that's subsidized by phone contracts and the like.
The limitations of mobile graphics can and will be solved in hardware and software. It may turn out for instance that something focused on high FPS and resolution can be achieved via low complexity shaders and some novel custom display/GPU hardware.
http://blogs.valvesoftware.com/abrash/why-you-wont-see-hard-...
I've been casually following Carmack & Occulus for a while; recurring theme is "X ms delay is too long". IIRC (corrections please?), wasn't until latency got down to 20ms that the nausea etc subsided. That doesn't leave much room to both render a high-res complex image and display it by anything more than the shortest transmission time conceivable.
You're also assuming a highly customized/optimized scenario for the wireless hop, nigh unto a straight analog signal. Digital processing will extend that, likely adding at least one full frame delay - again, something Carmack severely objected to and fought mightily against.
Not that a few milliseconds of latency really matter, but if you don't care about 2 milliseconds here and another 2 there, they start adding up. It's much better to try your best to have the lowest possible latency.
Noticing a flash of light can go into the 1000 fps territory.
Measuring ERGs (electro-retinogrammes) indicates that our photoreceptors can't really resolve luminance fluctuations above, at the very limit, 70-80Hz. Even Drosophila's high speed cascade doesn't really modulate beyond 200-250Hz. I'm really doubtful about those claims.
There's no circumstance in which increasing the frame rate causes nausea. In fact, it tends to decrease latency and reduce nausea. In the limit, reality has an essentially-infinite frame rate and doesn't cause nausea.
When low frame rates seem choppy, that's normally because there's a mismatch between frame rate and display refresh. GSync/freesync fix that to make things smooth even when the frame rate drops. Choppiness can also be due to the impulse response; technologies with a bright and short apparent pulse (CRT, Plasma, some OLED) will show better 'motion' than those that display and hold (LCD, some OLED).
[1] http://www.roadtovr.com/samsung-gear-vr-official-specificati...
> so 1ms wouldn't be a big deal
Even if it's 1ms, that means that you only have 19ms left for all of the processing / rendering, including to the I/O delay of getting motion data from the input.
Also, consider that you might allow for a small window for when things don't go as planned. So, 15ms to do the computations, for example.
That seems a good trade-off versus being tethered, you could for instance make up for that by letting the rest of the pipeline generate an image that is slightly worse to achieve the same framerate in an untethered situation.
Of course any latency increase will always come at some price the question is whether or not that is an acceptable price for the improvement you get along another dimension all this assuming that's an upper bound.
(And maybe there is higher end gear that I'm not aware of)
The article-by-article approach is what http://recent.io/ uses in its pipeline, which is working very well in testing so far.
More to the point, this looks like a perfectly decent story and an engaging read. The writer even managed to avoid being snarky about Samsung trying (sigh) to second-guess John Carmack!