UMKC School of Science and Engineering
3 HN recommenders · recommended in 4 months, 2017–2023
1:20:28 · 279K views · May 30, 2017
John Carmack speaks at UMKC's 2017 commencement event about the difficulties of VR, especially end-to-end latency across hardware and software. He covers why latency and buffering matter and how nausea is addressed.
Recommended whenever latency, buffering or VR comfort comes up, as an accessible account from someone who dealt with it directly.
5 comments from Hacker News
If you care about end-to-end latency, I highly recommend this talk by John Carmack: this video This talk blew my mind and made me feel like a terrible engineer. He's talking about end-to-end latency in VR, which actually has a commercial motivation because VR products with high latency will make you sick. (this obviously doesn't happen with shells and terminals!) He's talking about the buffering and filtering at every step of the way. And it's not just software -- sensors have their own controllers to do filtering, which requires buffering, before your OS kernel can even SEE the the first byte, let alone user space. On the other side, display devices and audio output devices also do nontrivial processing after you've sent them your data. It's an integrated hardware/software problem and Carmack is great at explaining it! It's a dense, long-ish talk, but worth it.
>Also, prolonged use causes nausea in a large percentage of people. There's an excellent video of John Carmack talking about this and how to solve it. This is much less of an issue now. this video I agree with you though that there aren't any killer apps for VR/AR yet, and it remains to be seen if there will be any at all.
this video I disagree. See the above link for a lecture where he describes the difficulties in VR in a manner that anybody with minimal programming experience can understand.
Oh definitely, see my comment here about an excellent talk by John Carmack on this very subject (end-to-end hardware/software latency in VR): this video [LINK]
John Carmack's lecture on systems engineering / reducing latency for VR mentions buffers repeatedly: this video