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aaronsnoswellon Ask HN: Who is hiring? (November 2016)

Cheers, I wasn't aware of any other Brisbane's world wide. I'll clarify next time.

aaronsnoswellon Ask HN: Who is hiring? (November 2016)

Boeing Research & Technology | 3D Designer - Unreal Engine | Brisbane | ONSITE

Hi folks. Interested in building the future of aviation? Come join a mixed reality research and development team within The Boeing Company, based in Australia.

The successful applicant will work within a small team of mixed reality specialists who are tasked with developing innovative enabling technologies for application within new and existing Boeing products and programs. The researcher will perform a variety of research activities focused predominantly within the field of Virtual Reality. Applicants must be Australian Citizens to meet defence security requirements.

Submit a resume and link to a portfolio here [1]. Applications still open.

[1] https://recruit.boeing.com.au/jobtools/jncustomsearch.viewFu...

aaronsnoswellon How to get people who installed a leaked build to stop using that build?

This is fascinating to me - do you know of any documented cases where a leak prevented someone filing for claim(s)?

aaronsnoswellon Windows Holographic Shell Demo [video]

Try 'HoloTour' for an amazing demo of virtual tourism on the HoloLens.

[Edit]: Didn't realise that the linked video actually showed off HoloTour :)

aaronsnoswellon Windows Holographic Shell Demo [video]

This x1000. So far most of the HoloLens apps are some variant of 'maps on tables' or 'floating screens'. This is totally wasting the potential of this platform.

aaronsnoswellon TransferWise

30s in to the video the narrator explains how TransferWise works. Am I correct in thinking that this problem is very NP-hard?

aaronsnoswellon SteamVR Tracking

Own the platform.

aaronsnoswellon Ask HN: Do you still play with VR actively?

You might be interested to know that Rec Room has a multiplayer VR ping-pong / beer-pong game - just head to the upstairs loft area.

aaronsnoswellon Microsoft forks Unreal Engine 4 and ports it to Universal Windows Platform

Hopefully this is a pre-cursor to seeing HoloLens build support from UE4.

aaronsnoswellon Tell HN: New features and a moderator

Yay! Been waiting for collapsible comments for ever! Thanks!

aaronsnoswellon The Problem with Reality

Have you seen the HoloLens by Microsoft? They've developed a custom silicon chip to off-board all the SLAM processing, and they use that for realtime localisation. Current SLAM techniques are absolutely fast enough for this, VR manufacturers just haven't gotten on board yet.

aaronsnoswellon CryEngine out on GitHub

1) What's the business goal of CryEngine putting this stuff out here. 2) (Possibly related) can you give an "I am not a lawyer, and don't speak for my employer, but here's a layman's take on it" interpretation of the CryEngine licence?

aaronsnoswellon Fire-damaged Brazilian tortoise receives new 3D shell

Would have been cooler if he received a new 2D shell in my opinion.

aaronsnoswellon Charge, a phone company with features for nerds

Great. When are you coming to Australia?

aaronsnoswellon Google supercharges machine learning tasks with TPU custom chip

I'm curious to know; is this announcement something that an expert in these sorts of areas could have (or did?) predict months or years ago, given Google's recent jumps forwards in Machine learning products? Can someone with more knowledge about this comment?

aaronsnoswellon Twitter to Stop Counting Photos and Links in 140-Character Limit

Why did this make the front page of HN?

aaronsnoswellon Ask HN: Anyone making a living off of desktop applications?

+1 for using a wrapped-web stack approach. We've recently taken another look at the Electron/NodeJS/WebSocket stack - it allows you to build a native app using web technologies, even calling native (WinAPI) calls. This space has really come a long way recently.

aaronsnoswellon Pre-Touch Sensing for Mobile Interaction [video]

I saw an internal demo of this technology 4 years ago at Windows Phone. Nice to see it finally making it's way into daylight.

aaronsnoswellon Facebook Surround 360: An Open 3D-360 video capture system

So far as I can tell from the scant technical details, this isn't a true 3D 360deg video solution. It seems like this camera will provide stereo 360deg video for horizontally aligned left-right eye positions, which is not the same as 3D 360deg video that supports any head and eye poses (that requires full light field capture or reconstruction). This means any user viewing a video that rolls their head left or right several degrees will get a headache pretty fast. I'm sick of people claiming '3D' 360 video is the same as full 6DOF tracked VR - it is not. </high horse>

aaronsnoswellon Jonathan Blow's new game, The Witness, is out

I have two questions that the steam page didn't answer; Can I play this in VR, and if not, why not? Jonathan Blow is a master artisan - I can't wait to try this game.

aaronsnoswellon Trying to interview Larry Page

I read it literally - as in, nothing interesting happened.

aaronsnoswellon A directory of Netflix's “secret” categories

Can someone explain what this is? Non-netflix user here.

aaronsnoswellon Lytro announces light field VR video camera

The Light Field Toolbox by Donald Dansereau allows you to view and modify Lytro Light fields and is open source, I've used it before.

http://www.mathworks.com/matlabcentral/fileexchange/49683-li...

aaronsnoswellon GTA V – Graphics Study

"Then, to simulate a real-world camera, a lens-distortion is performed on the image by using a small pixel shader. It does not only distorts the image, it also introduces small chromatic aberrations on the edges of the frame, by slightly distorting more the red channel compared to the green and blue ones."

Why would the engine do this? Is it to try and give a 'cinematic' feel to the game? Do our eyes suffer Chromatic aberration?

aaronsnoswellon Reverse-engineering how the Oculus Rift DK2′s tracking system works (2014)

Part 1 of an ongoing 4-part write-up. In part four he has released an alpha preview of his open source Oculus and VR framework; see http://github.com/Doc-Ok/OpticalTracking.

tl;dr; The Oculus positional tracker system uses 40 IR LEDs, each with a 10-bit cyclic code of bright or dim flashes. The tracker camera is synced to the headset and can identify each LED using these codes, elegantly simplifying the job of recovering the 3D position of the headset (the 'Perspective-n-Point' problem in Computer Vision). This gives very good absolute position and orientation tracking, however degrades when only coplanar LEDs are visible. This can be overcome by fusing the IMU data from the Oculus, which will be the contents of part four when it is written up.

This man (Oliver Kreylos) seems to do a great job of explaining computer vision problems. I really enjoyed reading these posts, and others on his blog. He's is very well qualified to write about these topics, as well (see his bio here: http://doc-ok.org/?page_id=6 - he has been researching in this area for years).

aaronsnoswellon Freevolt: RF energy harvesting to power the Internet of Things

We asked Lord Drayson if there were any limits on the number of Freevolt harvesters in a given area, or if there was a critical number of harvesters that would then impact cellular or Wi-Fi signal reception. He said "no" in both cases.

Both these answers are simply wrong - they are absorbing power from the RF spectrum. Of course there will be some impact.

aaronsnoswellon Ricochet: An encrypted, anonymous IM client built on Tor hidden services

Can someone explain how to verify the .asc signature file for this? I'm not familiar with pgp.

aaronsnoswellon Top data mining algorithms in plain English

What an excellent article!

aaronsnoswellon Generate memorable passwords using Markov Chains, Huffman trees, and Dickens

Yes - the length of a password is approximately proportional to the time taken to perform a naive brute force attack against it. Mixing different characters into passwords is a technique to limit the effectiveness of dictionary attacks against that password. Both techniques should ideally be combined for really strong passwords, but length alone is a good place to start.

aaronsnoswellon [dead]

Does for me :)