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Comment by lucasgw | Hacker News Reader

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...)

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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.

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.

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