Keynote by John Carmack at Oculus Connect 2014 [video] | Hacker News Reader

Keynote by John Carmack at Oculus Connect 2014 [video]

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291 pointsivank49 comments

I am only 10 minutes into this talk, but John is one awesome speaker. No PR talk at all, he is speaking his mind freely and in fact started with shortcomings of the product. The segue between different sections is so smooth. I do not have background in VR, but he explains things so smoothly. He is just freely talking about supply chain, and what the product constitutes. And he has been standing in the same spot. What a genuine speaker. Also, looks like Facebook's influence has been minimal. There is just no iota of bullshit in him. I like him already. My first John Carmack video, and I am already hooked. Now onto watching the full video.

If you liked his talk, definitely check out his QuakeCon keynotes and his talk about physically based lighting.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wt-iVFxgFWk https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Uooh0Y9fC_M https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=IyUgHPs86XM

I've watched the one on lighting twice, just cause it blew my mind so much. I finally (think I) understand light.

When I first read that, I thought "lighting" was some kind of mind altering drug. It is, if you do it right! ;)

I finished watching first one, and my admiration for him grows even more. Immense knowledge with a gift of presenting mere facts. What a likable personality. Thanks for the links.

What's great about his talks is how smooth they are. I'm not sure if that's a good analogy, but his talks are like waves in the sea. They are rolling from one topic to the other, nice and clean.

That's what it looks like when person knows what he's talking about and quite passionate about it - such person wants to share his thoughts and experiences.

It also requires strong intelligence, mental processing speed, vocabulary and frankly just giving a damn about not only the subject but clearly articulating it to the audience.

After I read "Smart Guy Productivity Pitfalls"¹ it became apparent to me that John he has quite an acute awareness of life's smaller details.

Too many people care too little about a lot of things. There seems to be a common perception that a passionate-about-the-reasonably-small-details attitude is simply being "anal" or "OCD". Finding people who are intensely passionate about their work-- not just the paycheck-- is insanely difficult. It'd be nice to have the company of more people who fall into John's category (though statistically unlikely at his level). I'm not saying that to hold him on some kind of pedestal, just giving him credit for his hard work.

¹ http://bookofhook.blogspot.com/2013/03/smart-guy-productivit...

Thanks for the link, very interesting read.

Absolutely agreed on the mental processing speed and acute awareness of smaller details. Look at this point in the video:- https://www.youtube.com/watch?feature=player_detailpage&v=nq... He has just opened the floor for questions, and the questioner does not have a microphone and hence audience cannot hear the question. John starts answering the question, but immediately recognizes the situation and then repeats the question for his audience.

Agreed, he presented so much information and did not stumble once, used no filler words, and did not deviate from the topic. It was commendable how freely he was talking about Android, Samsung and about each minute aspect of the device.

I love it when John Carmack talks, because he doesn't do marketing speak, and he doesn't dumb down his content. It's just a brain dump of technical info until they (almost literally) kick him off the stage.

I also love his enthusiasm for whatever he's talking about. Every time I listen to him I suddenly feel motivated to go and write a bunch of code.

Carmack has been a hero of mine since the mid 90s. He was also the inspiration for me to go into computer science. Always a pleasure to listen to such a technically dense talk on the cutting edge of a subject dear to me. I highly recommend his quake-con keynotes as well for those of you who like this video.

Perhaps even more impressive than Carmack's technical chops is his ability to stand in a single spot for hours on end.

Without a podium, he does look absurdly immobile on that large stage.

Because all the cycles are allocated to the verbal system rendering motor system immobile.

I almost chocked when reading this.

He moves but, is too fast for the camera speed.

No, the trick is just that he is interlacing himself, didn't you notice?? (otherwise he would flicker, obviously)

John Carmack facts!

He takes bathroom breaks during vertical refresh.

I was always impressed by this during several of his keynotes at QuakeCon the past few years. I believe it was 2012 when he was standing next to the chair talking and didn't seem to flinch for almost 2 hours straight.

Michael Abrash's keynote is worth checking out! https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=KS4yEyt5Qes

Thanks for the link. I'll probably end up watching this. I watched the Carmack talk as well.

Small note, but some things that kind of annoy me:

1. Audio sync issues -- the mouths and the words don't line up. I may just download the video and use the Audio Delay tool in VLC to watch it.

2. Start time of the talk: in this video you've just linked, the presentation doesn't even begin till like 6 mins in. Somewhat similar issue on the original video...

EDIT: Download link for the Abrash video: http://www.clipconverter.cc/download/pwvblTMb/123146223/

Download link for the Carmack video: http://www.clipconverter.cc/download/ecJvSoeC/123169959/

EDIT: Here's the "Bar/Far" video clip that Abrash showed, it was badly out of sync for me when I watched the presentation, but you can see it here: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=FefFfvriAwQ#t=64

And here's the side-by-side: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=FefFfvriAwQ#t=149

Pretty amazing.

Just finished watching, I am impressed at how low-level/technical he can get without boring or confusing the audience.

I have some experience with technical speaking and its very hard to make a technical point without dumbing it down for the audience.

I was in the room - he is a truly dynamic speaker and obviously a super-intelligent guy. I think he went off the rails a bit with the suggestion of interlacing as a potential solution. That makes little sense to me. It's, at best, a short-term solution once you get fast enough displays and rendering. (And as an old-time video guy... just... god, please... no...)

Interlace is a total hack solution for short term gain. Do it right from the start and HW can target right goals. If it's just for mobile, then it's still a hack for mobile that will infect everything else.

At the very least, non-structured patterns which our eyes fixate on, should be used to subsample images to deal with the bandwidth, power, rendering limitations.

It seems as though the facebook "must have a mobile solution" virus has infected Oculus and instead of taking the path of proving a successful product at a smaller pc/console quantities first, they're going for the whole "mobile" enchilada with all the requisite hack solutions.

Do it right how exactly? Oculus doesn't manufacture the hardware in question. Oculus is very much at the mercy of the smartphone display market. The only thing Oculus/Carmack can do is convince Samsung, and unless the change can impact the smartphone display market, Samsung is highly unlikely to be interested.

Unless you are suggesting Oculus get into the display manufacturing business? That's certainly interesting, but would probably add several years to their release timeline.

Oculus is very much at the mercy of the smartphone display market.

At some point, normally before somebody spends $2 billion dollars, that stops being a valid excuse in the hardware business.

About 1 billion smartphones shipped in 2013. $2 billion stops excuses for a lot of things, but this isn't one of them. Oculus will absolutely have to make due with the screens being made for phones.

I feel you in the pain of dealing with interlacing, but Carmack was envisaging a more flexible solution than plain two up interlacing. In particular his solution also made HDR imaging possible, which sounds like a worthwhile win to compensate for the pain of interlacing.

Patents for interlaced HDR techniques are out there for the capture chain and probably for the display side also. I think it's premature to take everything Carmack suggests as solutions as gospel as to how things will end up. Speaking from alot of experience in straddling software and cutting edge hardware development, solutions that make sense on one side often come out differently on the other side. And sometimes the best solution is biting the bullet and doing it right without the hacks and then optimizing the cost down.

While listening to all of the mitigation strategies that Carmack proposed for the technological challenges, I wondered if you could hack the user. What about drugs? Is there something that can reduce our sensitivity to low-frequency displays and yaw lag? At the very least, motion sickness drugs?

I'm sure there is, anti-emetic medication like Valoid really helps with nausea, and Cannabis can alleviate nausea and discomfort tremendously. But ideally we want to solve these problems in hardware, rather than wetware of course.

Sorry for the somewhat lame question, but is he always that still?

I'm 10 minutes in and I don't think he moved his feet once, and his right hand just a couple times.

It feels very weird for me to watch and I just noticed it now, is there something wrong with me?

Yes, its usually like that. He might sit down after a couple of hours though.

John Carmack is great technical speaker. His interesting thoughts flows in a continuous stream and as a listener its almost impossible to get distracted.

I wish Carmack does an interview like the one in "Coders at work" format where we can get some insight on

How he approaches debugging,

what tools he uses apart from visual studio.

How does he approaches already existing large code base?

What is the optimal duration to code without interruption.

What techniques does he use to get in to flow state e.t.c..

Nice use of keynote to directly present requirements to engineers throughout the display supply chain, especially in large companies like Samsung.

This keynote was by far the highlight of the entire conference for me

Second were the amazing demos on the Crescent Bay prototype

Nothing Carmack does is ever boring. This man is a huge inspiration for me.

Can anyone tl;dr the new stuff in this version of the oculus prototype ?

Lighter, higher resolution, higher frame rate, better lenses, larger tracking volume, 360 degree tracking, and built-in headphones. The resolution and frame rate are likely close if not identical to what the first consumer Oculus headset will have next year.

Not just built-in headphones, but also built-in positional audio APIs (possibly with hardware acceleration?)

Anyone's got a link to the slidedeck ?

There are no slides, as per usual for Carmack talks.

it becomes its own form of marketing speech, carmack was the reason i got involved: financially, temporally, and mentally; and i think the organisation understands this as common for a number of people.. especially 'developers'

the oculus is digital stereoscopy

which is hard with simple stationary fixed objects(i), but combine it with inferred spherical screen encapsulation and it becomes a real challenge, probably a fun one too

you let carmack wax poetic on his interesting ideas to fix this tech and he will talk about latency and hertz and i'll listen with bated breath because i like hearing people talk about solutions to problems

but then i put the headset on and i realise these are hardly the problems befallen the proposed goal

i want someone to address that piece of a person that is lost when they put the headset on for the first time, it almost appears physical when you see it waft out of them

i lost it, my gamer friend who already preemptively developed a defensive cyncism to the tech lost it, the eleven year old i introduce hacking to lost it, and that last one was probably the most signifigant for me to see

i had been using the object sitting on top of my bookshelf as an incentivising mechanism: 'finish your project and i'll let you use the oculus'; last week he pushed his finished project but i had other obligations the following week so he had to wait 'two! whole! weeks!' to get to use the oculus

when i picked him up the following week, uncharacteristically early this time.. we both are lax in our punctuallity but he refused to let me be late today so he came directly to me fifteen minutes early.. he went on and on about how he has been 'scared' all day:'scared, but like happy scared'; i tried to explain to him the concept of anxiety but his mind was hurling itself around all of what he was about to become witness to

i put the headset on him and he had fun with it, but when he took it off he became suddenly very pragmatic in his demeanor, he told me he thinks it hurt him, his head, his eyes, something.. he needed a glass of water, i explained that that was because instead of being a virtual reality in which he was transposed to the thing exploits an optical illusion which means your brain is doing a lot more work than it usually does trying to rectify the inconsistencies, if you've ever been frustrated by trying to see a sailboat in a magic eye you know what it feels like to use the oculus

i asked him his opinion:'honestly? ..well, unfortunately a little dissappointed';

i see my position as creating a safe environment for him to develop his ideas so naturally i challenged him to explain himself by defending the technological feat that he was holding in his hand, but the only thing we could talk about quickly became anything other than what we wanted to talk about

so we talked about the tech, i started going all carmack on him and we had fun talking tech but the conversation was clearly avoiding talking about the 'experience' one develops when wearing the headset

i wanted to know what he lost, and asked him to describe the thing he thought it was going to be, he was unable:'i don't know, just different, like? more 3d`ish'; in fashion i told him to explain himself explicitly stead superficially:'but what does that mean? what did you think it was going to be? describe that to me';

'i don't know anymore'

this i understood, but my experience was different, after wearing the headset i started to dream up better ways to do what i thought they were trying to do before i put it on, ways to do what i wanted from virtual reality, they are dreams and some built on the sort of technological feats of dreams but this was and still is my reaction each time i wear it

so yes john, tell me all about your brilliant ideas for fixing latency issues because this stuff is fun, but please acknowledge the baseline of this research is fundamentally flawed as it pertains to the proposed goals

i've stopped calling the oculus virtual reality, the oculus is digital stereoscopy

. (i) the first thing i did with the oculus was pull up two terminals, cat out some of my writing, align vertically, then slowly move one terminal into the field of view of the other eye until the text seemed to stop wonking my brain and really pop out at me

the experience was profound

so, i threw together a little browser playground with two 117px squares, one blue and one pink, i aligned them vertically then again slowly moved one into the field of view of the other eye, and i waited until those two distinct colors overlaid in my mind as a single purple

herein lies the problem: there was a multi pixel range where my brain would close the gap manually, out of my control and rather forcibly; it was impossible for me to find the perfect distance between the two divs, 340pxs worked but so did plus or minus 4px from 344px, the perfect'exact`preferred`innate distance was undiscoverable because of the exception handling in my brain's interpretation of my visual input

.. edit:: gramm`err

For the psychological "human" side of Oculus, check out some of Michael Abrash's talks

If you ask around rift devs and users what's the longest they stay in the "lost' world, it's usually around 20 minutes. That says alot.

john,

11:58~ :: resolution issues :: you mention comparing 1080 to 1440 saying 'you have to look kind of carefully or interact with it for a long time to determine the difference in quality' those are the exact two things you do with the screen when using the oculus.. first thing i found myself doing was counting pixels, because i could, because the screen is on my nose tip, and interacting with it a long time is physically painful: after a two hour film my eyes had bags under them but white bags as if my eyes were starved of blood for that whole time cut off by the goggles pressing to my face; but this is what i wanted: i wanted a digital workspace! terminals flying around me, above me below me, stacked in front of me, i want my development marathons to be done in a virtual space

18:00~ :: interlacing scans :: why do the scans have to be left to right? i like the multi line gap interlacing idea: each individual gap creating its designated frame; but i wonder if you've considered scanning the lines from the middle out in both directions.. is this possible? hardware changes? one upsetting realisation with the oculus was the importance of both neck to skull mobility as well as eye rotation mobility, if my vision is focused at the center and blurred in the periphery i need something moving both with my pupils as well as my skull, but since your tech has yet to offer a way to do this it could easily exploit its own limitations by just scanning those lines from middle out as it already assumes i am looking straight ahead at the screen, also at 33 minutes you talk about the importance of resolution..?

23:00~ :: position tracking :: vision purity is a heartbreaking itch.. i've spent very little time thinking about the issue of position tracking.. i left the tracker unplugged for a long time in the early days of using the device, i only really plugged it in in order to assume a position of solidarity with the project as it is, hopefully only for now, in its entirity.. only thought i've had is embedded seems necessary.. i'll be looking at a blade of grass and as i get closer to it, getting down on the ground to really look at and around then suddenly i will leave the field of view for the tracker and be jarringly thrown into some default position until i adjust and i'm picked up again and placed back at my actual position

33:00~ :: resolution :: interesting to come back to this later and from an opposing position.. i think this sort of developmental focus contradiction is necessary to simultaneously improve multiple aspects of the experience

40:00~ :: stereo pano :: this sounds like me arguing with my math teacher in highschool how calculus is 'just a hack', a practical hack that has giving us signifigant comforts from the technology it affords, but most assuredly a hack.. the head tilt problem sounds like an area for fascinating research, also sounds like a capture problem, the photographer, that when figured will become a display problem, the stereo display tech.. perhaps you could usurp the capture solution by messing around with light field cameras like lytro? and solve the display issues before capture shows you you have them

42:00~ :: stereo pano cirque demo :: i like the incorporation of positional audio, this reminded me of the scene in guardians when rocket is disciplining a defeated drax:'we've all got dead people'; this was the first scene in a 3d movie where i felt like the set was built with 3d in mind, the practical effects seemed to catch up with the digital, shedding their historic bindings to the theatre, and i was impressed and excited about the future of 3d movies for the first time

48:37 :: benchmarking :: 'i'm sure i could write a benchmark that could win relative to something else'.. that is the single most hilarious and excellent sentence in regard to benchmarking that i have ever heard, love it

50:00~ :: cardboard :: cardboard is interesting, i read it the first time as a sort of commentary`derision`joke by googs to bacefook for buying oculus, but the execution was so well done and thought out that it almost redeemed itself, and in reality the cardboard makes you appreciate the oculus more.. i think stereoscopy is innately flawed and with the cardboard you can see the limitations and shortcomings outright which effectively shows how well the oculus hides its flaws

1:06:00~ :: thermal :: the thermal seems a greater problem for gear than oculus, why the gear placed a shell around the phone stead some clip in feature seemed to aggressively deny this as an issue, but hearing how much you are concerned and interested in thermal issues makes me wonder if samsung's agreement with oculus has tied you all to their gear interests or what are your motivating affects? i understand the whole whats good on mobile is great on`for pc but still..

1:10:00~ :: up vectors :: 'breaking what we want to accomplish in vr'.. i'm sorry i disagree with you on this one, hard coding any elements of the experience is going to make for a bad user experience, have your interests as defaults but allow users to use it as they want, i want to lay on my back and have my virtual up vector orthagonal to my meat space up vector, sometimes, sometimes we make unreasonable descisions but i want to be able to.. like laying on my back watching a movie, thankfully the whirligig player allows me to orient the screen to whatever angle regardless of the positional trackers' understanding of my virtual orientation

1:11:40 :: async time warp :: 'you win arguments by showing an existence proof', excellent

1:22:00~ :: eye slicing :: un chien andalou

1:27:00+ :: questions

. 1:35:00~ :: lenses :: i look forward to seeing your non-circular lens implementation, the idea of rendering more than throwing away the excess is the optimal way to develop

thank you for your time, and effort

.. edit :: gramm`err

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