Giant Bomb
1 HN recommender · recommended in 5 months, 2012–2023
17:38 · 102K views · Jun 6, 2012
Giant Bomb interviews John Carmack at E3 2012 about his virtual reality head-mounted display prototype. He demos it and talks about latency, depth and focus problems in VR.
HN links it as a primary source from the early days of modern VR, showing Carmack discussing his work before Oculus took off.
7 comments from Hacker News
Nice interview with John demoing and discussing his work: "So the way this has gone, is, I decided to treat myself after Rage on there, I bought a, you know, a head mount for $1,500 or so. It's a little cottage industry, there's a few places that do these things with integration, and... it sucked. It was really bad. It was everything that I expected it to be, that it, it didn't look like there had been any progress in 20 years, since... or 15 years since I had looked at these things last. But, when I got that, then, I started taking it apart, both literally and figuratively, to go ahead and see what are all of the aspects on here, on the sensing side, where, when I wrote my own test software for this, using their library to go ahead and get the head-tracking, it had 100ms of latency, and this just didn't make any sense to me. Why is it so bad, did they need to have so much filtering? And, I wound up, I took the software that I wrote for Armadillo Aerospace for our rocket control with fiber-optic gyros, I took that gyro integration software and took raw values from the micro-machine sensors on there, and all the sudden it got way better. You know I can only guess that they may have filtering from 10 years ago when they had really noisy sensors, and they're a lot better now." [...] Resolution is gonna get better. We're gonna get to 120Hz displays, I'm haranguing all the display vendors about this. [...] Removing the latency, one of the cases that I've been making that shows the
Wow, I'm just now seeing this news. Initially, I had that sinking feeling set in... I mean, like you, I have been impacted by his story, his games (not just the Wolfenstein/Doom/Quake franchises... I'm talking Commander Keen, boys and girls), his code, reading Masters of Doom , etc. I can see my copy of Michael Abrash's Graphics Programming Black Book Special Edition sitting here, which was such a treat to read when it came out, because it has so many great chapters on the development of Quake and little stories about John's discoveries and thought processes throughout the development of the game. But, then I thought... wait... this is a new beginning. I wrote about this previously, but, look for gaming to start heading in the direction of VR with technology like Oculus Rift. Also, with someone of the caliber of John Carmack involved (now totally focused on it because of the resignation announcement) with not only his passion and skill, but his ability to work with graphics hardware manufacturers and driver developers to effect change and garner the necessary support and backing, expect to see vibrant, compelling developments in this field. In case you missed it, check this video out of John discussing some of his VR work. It is from E3 2012: this video That momentary sinking feeling has faded away now... great things are ahead!
Thanks for the info. You will definitely be interested in this part of John's interview, where he discusses depth and how he approached the problem. It starts at around 9:20 and ends at around 11:25: this video
Carmack had this to say earlier, in a 3-part Tweet: "Everyone has had some time to digest the FB deal now. I think it is going to be positive, but clearly many disagree. Much of the ranting has been emotional or tribal, but I am interested in reading coherent viewpoints about objective outcomes. What are the hazards? What should be done to guard against them? What are the tests for failure? Blog and I'll read." Also, this: "I would expect Facebook to not exert any overt control over Oculus unless Oculus fumbles badly a few times, at which point they SHOULD." ~~~~ My personal take: At the end of the day, it takes more than vision and hard work to drive a dream into existence... it takes investment . It takes capital . This is what the deal brings to the table. Not only that, as you probably know by now, Michael Abrash has joined the team. I mean, read Michael's blog and note all of the technical challenges and issues with implementing VR. Read Carmack's technical writings on latency issues. There are a lot of problems to solve, on top of building and delivering a solid, commercial-quality hardware and software experience. For example, there is tracking head position and orientation, rendering without shearing and judder, latency issues, etc... everything must be perfect in order to deliver the perfect experience. Facebook brings the needed investment, plus the scaling infrastructure experience to the table. John has said, "I have a deep respect for the technical scale that FB
Focusing on gaming in my response here... I think the next "Big Thing" is that we are going to start moving more and more toward Augmented Reality (AR) [1] and Virtual Reality (VR) [2]. Thoughts: 1. Look for gaming to start heading in the direction of VR with technology like Oculus Rift [3]. Also, with someone of the caliber of John Carmack [4] involved, with not only his passion and skill, but his ability to work with graphics hardware manufacturers and driver developers to effect change and garner the necessary support and backing, expect to see vibrant, compelling developments in this field. Here is a video of John discussing some of his VR work. It is from E3 2012: this video 2. Look to see more games like Ingress [5] as things start to move toward AR. 3. I realize that this may be an extreme, perhaps well-into-the-future example, but check out this short film entitled, Sight . It is not difficult to imagine that this is where we are heading with technology like Google Glass (e.g., Note in the film the gamification of things like cooking and dating. Personally, the dating part is scary.) [LINK] -- [1] [LINK] [2] [LINK] [3] [LINK] [4] [LINK] [5] [LINK]