7 ms·

John Carmack reviews VR app “Just Relax”

107 points by tsemple 9y ago

AndrewKemendo 9y ago
He makes the point about UE having default large packages. Not a huge problem for desktop VR apps for vive and rift, but is a limiting factor. This is however a major problem for mobile, using both unity and UE and I know it is preventing more mobile VR and AR apps from being developed. Given that carmack is really focused on mobile I'd think oculus would want to create a light weight development/graphics engine. I'm wondering why oculus hasn't made one especially since they have the skills and capability. Maybe I missed it and they have one.
- vvanders 9y ago
  Building an engine takes years and a large(~30+) team if you want to match UE4/Unity in terms of productivity.
  - faragon 9y ago
    30, or one Carmack.
  - AndrewKemendo 9y ago
    I'm very familiar with what it takes. We built a mobile AR engine based on OpenGL starting back in 2013 that launched in 2015. I'm sure FB has more than enough fantastic personnel and resources to build a great engine.
    - vvanders 9y ago
      Game engine != Productivity(artist/designer) focused game engine. I've worked on UE3 based titles, in-house engines and quite a few in-between. Building a new engine from the ground up is easily in the 10s of millions if not more which is why you rarely see new entries into the market. Sure FB could do it, but it probably makes more sense to worth with UE4/Unity to augment them. You'll be able to draw from a large base of developers/designers/artists who already understand the workflow instead of having to build up that community from scratch. [edit] Also the default-large packages of UE titles is mostly a function of optimization, We'd have only ~200mb of system memory back on the PS3 which is way smaller then what modern mobile platforms have available to them. UE has a bunch of things you can do to pull them down, it just takes work.
      - AndrewKemendo 9y ago
        I don't disagree with any of that. However the point is it would be huge for the development community but a relatively small project for Facebook. Would solidify platform lock in even further.
        vvanders 9y ago
        Why do I want a platform lock? As a gamedev that's the worst thing that can happen unless there's substantial compensation on the other side of the equation.
        AndrewKemendo 9y ago
        Well we don't, but facebook certainly does, which is why I think it's in their interest to do so,
    - greggman 9y ago
      Sure you made an engine, I doubt it has 1/50th of the real feature of the top engines. Can it import layers for photoshop or do you have to save as .PNGs. Can you import Maya, 3DS Max, Blender, and others or only some exported format like Collada. Do you have support for Right to Left text, All of Unicode? Do you run on 15 platforms including things 3DS, Switch, ... Do you have an IDE non-programmers can use? Does it have undo? Is it localized into other languages? Does it have a plugin system? Can those plugins be loaded and unloaded while it's running to do you have to exit, recompile, and restart to use plugins. Do you have shader editors? Animation Edtiors? Can you apply different animations to portions of a character? Do you have physics? How about phyiscally based animations? I'm sure you're going to tell me "yes" to all of those but sorry, as someone who's made several engines myself NES, Amiga, 3D0, DOS, Windows, PS1, PS2, PS3/XBOX 360, I know from experience that just "making an engine" is like 3% of the real work involved in getting to the level of Unreal and Unity. It's very easy to "make an engine", it's a lot harder to fill it out with features and tools.
      - AndrewKemendo 9y ago
        Right which is totally out of scope of Facebook's capabilities right? Give me a break. You can pile up an infinite list of capabilities for any kind of ide, engine, editor etc... Point is, if anyone can do it its Facebook and it would be great for the dev community. Take that chip of your shoulder for a minute.
        vvanders 9y ago
        There's no chip on his shoulder, all of those things listed are stuff that UE supports out of the box. There's also a ton of things not mentioned like the cinematic editor, scripting system, cooking process, etc. Honestly even if Facebook could, I'm not sure I want them to. I've got enough privacy concerns around what they do on the web. The last thing I need is to have a game engine that's used to mine every piece of data then can from me. When you have a non-games company controlling a platform their concerns are going to be above what's best for the content creators(see also: publishers).
        greggman 9y ago
  - AndrewKemendo 9y ago
    Ha, well it looks like I was right, except instead of an engine for VR they made it for AR.
- WalterGR 9y ago
  He makes the point about UE having default large packages. Not a huge problem for desktop VR apps for vive and rift, but is a limiting factor. For who? That's a serious question. I have fast wifi connectivity at home, at the local coffee shop, at my local bar, at the local libarary, etc. I have a limited cell phone data plan, and I could download that app 16 times in a month for free. For who is it a limiting factor to download a 191 megabyte app? Old-timers who calculate how many multiples that is of the RAM of their first 8-bit home computer? The under- or non-developed world? Or am I so spoiled that I don't even realie that 191 megabytes is a thing?
  - AndrewKemendo 9y ago
    Or am I so spoiled that I don't even realie that 191 megabytes is a thing I think that's the most likely option honestly. I don't mean that to be snarky, by the way. Most of the dedicated VR users now are still largely in the early adopter space and are heavily high end PC users - so they generally have higher levels of technology ubiquity. To reach the vast majority of people, the costs, in both money and accessibility, need to drastically come down. Practically, for facebook and other developers, that means reducing the overhead on these systems dramatically. Mobile is the nearest term approach to this - though still unsolved. Again, this is why Carmack is focusing heavily on GearVR development and says so himself [1]: "There is no way that a PC peripheral or a game console winds up being the path that billions of people interact with." [1] http://www.reaxxion.com/7793/carmack-announces-that-oculus-rift-is-switching-to-mobile http://www.reaxxion.com/7793/carmack-announces-that-oculus-r...
TheDrizzle43 9y ago
It would be nice if Facebook's register an account pop-up didn't occupy 1/4 of the screen.
- salesguy222 9y ago
  Agreed. Unfortunately, when you take your social network public, investors demand growth. When user growth plateaus, it seems FB has chosen to be more aggressive in forcing you into their network ^.^
  - hashhar 9y ago
    I don't understand why growth is measured as a percentage? Obviously the growth rate for Facebook can NEVER be greater than the growth rate of the population of people born into households with internet. And that can be nowhere near 20% YOY even. It's what is responsible for the stupid fallacy that PC is dying. It's not dying - it's has more longevity. A machine I built in 2008 is still going strong. Only had to upgrade the CPU once and switch out a RAM module. Many other people are the same. Also consider this scenario: 1. You have a world of 1 bn people. 2. A company has 0.5 bn of them as customers. 3. The population increases to 1.08% (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Population_growth https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Population_growth) = 1.0108 bn 4. The company grows to 1 bn people which is a 100% growth. 5. The population increases to 1.02171664 bn. 6. The investors say that growth has slipped from 100% to 0%. That's stupid. The growth has stagnated because there IS NO ROOM to grow!!! Am I missing something?
    - branchless 9y ago
      New debt issuance comes with an interest rate expressed as a percentage. The system has insanity as a core feature.
    - monkmartinez 9y ago
      If Facebook went away tomorrow, no one on the planet would be adversely harmed. IMO, investors price in the fact that most social networks are ephemeral. Grow or have stock price hammered into dust.
Animats 9y ago
It looks like Illusion's Sexy Beach, only without the sex.
bertman 9y ago
The title made me expect a well-worded post about the current state state of VR by Carmack. Maybe change the title?
- mrieck 9y ago
  "John Carmack critiques your VR bullshit he could code in 2 hours using less memory" https://twitter.com/SuperAnimoGIF/status/853641374419341313 https://twitter.com/SuperAnimoGIF/status/853641374419341313
eklavya 9y ago
Did I miss something? Should you give someone feedback on a public post? Writing generically about something you noticed would be fine but to specifically talk about a project, I don't know, I would feel super uncomfortable if it was done to me.
- cma 9y ago
  It is a series of public feedback posts; the devs know it will be public. It is supposed to be able to help other people.
  - eklavya 9y ago
    Ok, didn't know that. It's upto him how he wants to do it. But really a generic post without naming anyone would also get the point across, just my opinion.
  - tinus_hn 9y ago
    Imagine the exposure you get from such a post.. I think a little bruise on your ego would be worth it.
- psyc 9y ago
  This is a thing that John Carmack, specifically, does routinely. I'd imagine most people who work with him know he does this, and he was probably in communication with the devs.
  - nawitus 9y ago
    At least in the past the devs specifically ask for feedback from Carmack knowing that the review will be public.
- JustSomeNobody 9y ago
  Maybe in return for his time, he gets to post it publicly? It could prove useful to others, surely.
Kenji 9y ago
I tried to take a frame snapshot with Snapdragon Profiler to be able to make specific comments, but that didn’t work because the app doesn’t have the INTERNET permission listed in the manifest, which is required to communicate with the profiler. Now that's a problem I would have never even imagined being possible.
dingo_bat 9y ago
The Oculus Home app (GearVR/S7 edge) recently received an update that has literally blown everything out of the water in terms of quality. I simply don't feel like launching an app now, just want to look at the scenery. I didn't see anything about it on HN, so here are a couple of links about the update: https://www.vrfocus.com/2017/03/carmack-on-oculus-home-update-this-is-much-more-than-just-a-rewrite/ https://www.vrfocus.com/2017/03/carmack-on-oculus-home-updat... https://uploadvr.com/new-john-carmack-software-doubles-oculus-home-resolution-gear-vr/ https://uploadvr.com/new-john-carmack-software-doubles-oculu...
- dmix 9y ago
  > Static images with mip maps or proper prefiltering can go up to around 18 pixels per degree if you really want the most detail in the center. I'm not very familiar with VR. What does he mean here by "center"?
  - dingo_bat 9y ago
    Center just means center of the rendered scene. I dunno how to explain it clearly, but just think of wherever you are looking at any moment.
  - meheleventyone 9y ago
    Mobile VR works by rendering both eyes to the screen. The result is then seen through lenses. As a result pixel density is highest in the center of each eye. So in this case center means the portion of the screen under the midpoint of each lens.
dmix 9y ago
Here's what the game looks like: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Vfz6_V5Ldyw https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Vfz6_V5Ldyw I could see this being a great product when combined with those guide meditation apps. Like https://www.headspace.com https://www.headspace.com I remember one of these meditation tapes I found on PirateBay which combine binaural beats and guided meditation. It had you climbing a lush mountain, coming upon an old looking door in the side of the mountain, and being in this relaxing room with pillows on the ground and you look up and see stars. That was my first exposure to meditation and it surprisingly put me in a very hypnotic/meditative state after the 30 minutes was over. Very good state to get in before starting creative design work. It would be a great experience to translate to VR with 3d sound.
davesque 9y ago
I expected this to be an insightful post by Carmack about the current trends and concerns in the VR industry. It turned out to be what sounds like an entirely predictable review that could have been written by anyone with a bit of technical knowledge of a poorly designed VR app. Not very interesting. Don't really understand why this is getting so much attention.
- stagger87 9y ago
  I think it is awesome Carmack takes the time to do this. He clearly cares about VR and the experience users have with VR, even on seemingly trivial apps such as this one. I imagine most developers in this space would love to be peer reviewed by Carmack. Some of his comments seem to be nuanced rendering suggestions, I'm not sure anyone with a 'bit of technical knowledge' could provide this level of feedback.
Animats 9y ago
If you like forest scenes, there's Speedtree.[1] Speedtree is a commercial terrain and vegetation generator for games. It can procedurally generate huge landscapes in real time, and has level of detail handling so the world will fit in memory. There are some Speedtree demos where you can walk around in a forest. It's like a game with good visuals, except nothing happens. Very peaceful. [1] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=f9Z142aOsm4 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=f9Z142aOsm4
Animats 9y ago
I mentioned Speedtree previously, and that gave me an idea. There's High Fidelity, which is a big, empty open source VR world, sort of like Second Life with few users but better resolution. High Fidelity starts with an empty world of a huge flat plane. Users are supposed to fill it up. Right now, it's very empty. It should be initialized to be more like the real world. The terrain comes up as unexplored wilderness, with hills, mountains, valleys, lakes, trees, deserts, and vegetation. If you own land (which is a server-side thing), you can build it and clear it. It would be a nice touch if moving around wore paths, so that paths and roads appeared naturally.

107 points by tsemple 9y ago

He makes the point about UE having default large packages. Not a huge problem for desktop VR apps for vive and rift, but is a limiting factor. This is however a major problem for mobile, using both unity and UE and I know it is preventing more mobile VR and AR apps from being developed. Given that carmack is really focused on mobile I'd think oculus would want to create a light weight development/graphics engine. I'm wondering why oculus hasn't made one especially since they have the skills and capability. Maybe I missed it and they have one.

vvanders 9y ago
Building an engine takes years and a large(~30+) team if you want to match UE4/Unity in terms of productivity.
- faragon 9y ago
  30, or one Carmack.
- AndrewKemendo 9y ago
  I'm very familiar with what it takes. We built a mobile AR engine based on OpenGL starting back in 2013 that launched in 2015. I'm sure FB has more than enough fantastic personnel and resources to build a great engine.
  - vvanders 9y ago
    Game engine != Productivity(artist/designer) focused game engine. I've worked on UE3 based titles, in-house engines and quite a few in-between. Building a new engine from the ground up is easily in the 10s of millions if not more which is why you rarely see new entries into the market. Sure FB could do it, but it probably makes more sense to worth with UE4/Unity to augment them. You'll be able to draw from a large base of developers/designers/artists who already understand the workflow instead of having to build up that community from scratch. [edit] Also the default-large packages of UE titles is mostly a function of optimization, We'd have only ~200mb of system memory back on the PS3 which is way smaller then what modern mobile platforms have available to them. UE has a bunch of things you can do to pull them down, it just takes work.
    - AndrewKemendo 9y ago
      I don't disagree with any of that. However the point is it would be huge for the development community but a relatively small project for Facebook. Would solidify platform lock in even further.
      - vvanders 9y ago
        Why do I want a platform lock? As a gamedev that's the worst thing that can happen unless there's substantial compensation on the other side of the equation.
        AndrewKemendo 9y ago
        Well we don't, but facebook certainly does, which is why I think it's in their interest to do so,
  - greggman 9y ago
    Sure you made an engine, I doubt it has 1/50th of the real feature of the top engines. Can it import layers for photoshop or do you have to save as .PNGs. Can you import Maya, 3DS Max, Blender, and others or only some exported format like Collada. Do you have support for Right to Left text, All of Unicode? Do you run on 15 platforms including things 3DS, Switch, ... Do you have an IDE non-programmers can use? Does it have undo? Is it localized into other languages? Does it have a plugin system? Can those plugins be loaded and unloaded while it's running to do you have to exit, recompile, and restart to use plugins. Do you have shader editors? Animation Edtiors? Can you apply different animations to portions of a character? Do you have physics? How about phyiscally based animations? I'm sure you're going to tell me "yes" to all of those but sorry, as someone who's made several engines myself NES, Amiga, 3D0, DOS, Windows, PS1, PS2, PS3/XBOX 360, I know from experience that just "making an engine" is like 3% of the real work involved in getting to the level of Unreal and Unity. It's very easy to "make an engine", it's a lot harder to fill it out with features and tools.
    - AndrewKemendo 9y ago
      Right which is totally out of scope of Facebook's capabilities right? Give me a break. You can pile up an infinite list of capabilities for any kind of ide, engine, editor etc... Point is, if anyone can do it its Facebook and it would be great for the dev community. Take that chip of your shoulder for a minute.
      - vvanders 9y ago
        There's no chip on his shoulder, all of those things listed are stuff that UE supports out of the box. There's also a ton of things not mentioned like the cinematic editor, scripting system, cooking process, etc. Honestly even if Facebook could, I'm not sure I want them to. I've got enough privacy concerns around what they do on the web. The last thing I need is to have a game engine that's used to mine every piece of data then can from me. When you have a non-games company controlling a platform their concerns are going to be above what's best for the content creators(see also: publishers).
      - greggman 9y ago
- AndrewKemendo 9y ago
  Ha, well it looks like I was right, except instead of an engine for VR they made it for AR.
WalterGR 9y ago
He makes the point about UE having default large packages. Not a huge problem for desktop VR apps for vive and rift, but is a limiting factor. For who? That's a serious question. I have fast wifi connectivity at home, at the local coffee shop, at my local bar, at the local libarary, etc. I have a limited cell phone data plan, and I could download that app 16 times in a month for free. For who is it a limiting factor to download a 191 megabyte app? Old-timers who calculate how many multiples that is of the RAM of their first 8-bit home computer? The under- or non-developed world? Or am I so spoiled that I don't even realie that 191 megabytes is a thing?
- AndrewKemendo 9y ago
  Or am I so spoiled that I don't even realie that 191 megabytes is a thing I think that's the most likely option honestly. I don't mean that to be snarky, by the way. Most of the dedicated VR users now are still largely in the early adopter space and are heavily high end PC users - so they generally have higher levels of technology ubiquity. To reach the vast majority of people, the costs, in both money and accessibility, need to drastically come down. Practically, for facebook and other developers, that means reducing the overhead on these systems dramatically. Mobile is the nearest term approach to this - though still unsolved. Again, this is why Carmack is focusing heavily on GearVR development and says so himself [1]: "There is no way that a PC peripheral or a game console winds up being the path that billions of people interact with." [1] http://www.reaxxion.com/7793/carmack-announces-that-oculus-rift-is-switching-to-mobile http://www.reaxxion.com/7793/carmack-announces-that-oculus-r...

TheDrizzle43 9y ago

It would be nice if Facebook's register an account pop-up didn't occupy 1/4 of the screen.

salesguy222 9y ago
Agreed. Unfortunately, when you take your social network public, investors demand growth. When user growth plateaus, it seems FB has chosen to be more aggressive in forcing you into their network ^.^
- hashhar 9y ago
  I don't understand why growth is measured as a percentage? Obviously the growth rate for Facebook can NEVER be greater than the growth rate of the population of people born into households with internet. And that can be nowhere near 20% YOY even. It's what is responsible for the stupid fallacy that PC is dying. It's not dying - it's has more longevity. A machine I built in 2008 is still going strong. Only had to upgrade the CPU once and switch out a RAM module. Many other people are the same. Also consider this scenario: 1. You have a world of 1 bn people. 2. A company has 0.5 bn of them as customers. 3. The population increases to 1.08% (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Population_growth https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Population_growth) = 1.0108 bn 4. The company grows to 1 bn people which is a 100% growth. 5. The population increases to 1.02171664 bn. 6. The investors say that growth has slipped from 100% to 0%. That's stupid. The growth has stagnated because there IS NO ROOM to grow!!! Am I missing something?
  - branchless 9y ago
    New debt issuance comes with an interest rate expressed as a percentage. The system has insanity as a core feature.
  - monkmartinez 9y ago
    If Facebook went away tomorrow, no one on the planet would be adversely harmed. IMO, investors price in the fact that most social networks are ephemeral. Grow or have stock price hammered into dust.

Animats 9y ago

It looks like Illusion's Sexy Beach, only without the sex.

bertman 9y ago

The title made me expect a well-worded post about the current state state of VR by Carmack. Maybe change the title?

mrieck 9y ago
"John Carmack critiques your VR bullshit he could code in 2 hours using less memory" https://twitter.com/SuperAnimoGIF/status/853641374419341313 https://twitter.com/SuperAnimoGIF/status/853641374419341313

eklavya 9y ago

Did I miss something? Should you give someone feedback on a public post? Writing generically about something you noticed would be fine but to specifically talk about a project, I don't know, I would feel super uncomfortable if it was done to me.

cma 9y ago
It is a series of public feedback posts; the devs know it will be public. It is supposed to be able to help other people.
- eklavya 9y ago
  Ok, didn't know that. It's upto him how he wants to do it. But really a generic post without naming anyone would also get the point across, just my opinion.
- tinus_hn 9y ago
  Imagine the exposure you get from such a post.. I think a little bruise on your ego would be worth it.
psyc 9y ago
This is a thing that John Carmack, specifically, does routinely. I'd imagine most people who work with him know he does this, and he was probably in communication with the devs.
- nawitus 9y ago
  At least in the past the devs specifically ask for feedback from Carmack knowing that the review will be public.
JustSomeNobody 9y ago
Maybe in return for his time, he gets to post it publicly? It could prove useful to others, surely.

Kenji 9y ago

I tried to take a frame snapshot with Snapdragon Profiler to be able to make specific comments, but that didn’t work because the app doesn’t have the INTERNET permission listed in the manifest, which is required to communicate with the profiler. Now that's a problem I would have never even imagined being possible.

dingo_bat 9y ago

The Oculus Home app (GearVR/S7 edge) recently received an update that has literally blown everything out of the water in terms of quality. I simply don't feel like launching an app now, just want to look at the scenery. I didn't see anything about it on HN, so here are a couple of links about the update: https://www.vrfocus.com/2017/03/carmack-on-oculus-home-update-this-is-much-more-than-just-a-rewrite/ https://www.vrfocus.com/2017/03/carmack-on-oculus-home-updat... https://uploadvr.com/new-john-carmack-software-doubles-oculus-home-resolution-gear-vr/ https://uploadvr.com/new-john-carmack-software-doubles-oculu...

dmix 9y ago
> Static images with mip maps or proper prefiltering can go up to around 18 pixels per degree if you really want the most detail in the center. I'm not very familiar with VR. What does he mean here by "center"?
- dingo_bat 9y ago
  Center just means center of the rendered scene. I dunno how to explain it clearly, but just think of wherever you are looking at any moment.
- meheleventyone 9y ago
  Mobile VR works by rendering both eyes to the screen. The result is then seen through lenses. As a result pixel density is highest in the center of each eye. So in this case center means the portion of the screen under the midpoint of each lens.

dmix 9y ago

Here's what the game looks like: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Vfz6_V5Ldyw https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Vfz6_V5Ldyw I could see this being a great product when combined with those guide meditation apps. Like https://www.headspace.com https://www.headspace.com I remember one of these meditation tapes I found on PirateBay which combine binaural beats and guided meditation. It had you climbing a lush mountain, coming upon an old looking door in the side of the mountain, and being in this relaxing room with pillows on the ground and you look up and see stars. That was my first exposure to meditation and it surprisingly put me in a very hypnotic/meditative state after the 30 minutes was over. Very good state to get in before starting creative design work. It would be a great experience to translate to VR with 3d sound.

davesque 9y ago

I expected this to be an insightful post by Carmack about the current trends and concerns in the VR industry. It turned out to be what sounds like an entirely predictable review that could have been written by anyone with a bit of technical knowledge of a poorly designed VR app. Not very interesting. Don't really understand why this is getting so much attention.

stagger87 9y ago
I think it is awesome Carmack takes the time to do this. He clearly cares about VR and the experience users have with VR, even on seemingly trivial apps such as this one. I imagine most developers in this space would love to be peer reviewed by Carmack. Some of his comments seem to be nuanced rendering suggestions, I'm not sure anyone with a 'bit of technical knowledge' could provide this level of feedback.

Animats 9y ago

If you like forest scenes, there's Speedtree.[1] Speedtree is a commercial terrain and vegetation generator for games. It can procedurally generate huge landscapes in real time, and has level of detail handling so the world will fit in memory. There are some Speedtree demos where you can walk around in a forest. It's like a game with good visuals, except nothing happens. Very peaceful. [1] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=f9Z142aOsm4 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=f9Z142aOsm4

Animats 9y ago

I mentioned Speedtree previously, and that gave me an idea. There's High Fidelity, which is a big, empty open source VR world, sort of like Second Life with few users but better resolution. High Fidelity starts with an empty world of a huge flat plane. Users are supposed to fill it up. Right now, it's very empty. It should be initialized to be more like the real world. The terrain comes up as unexplored wilderness, with hills, mountains, valleys, lakes, trees, deserts, and vegetation. If you own land (which is a server-side thing), you can build it and clear it. It would be a nice touch if moving around wore paths, so that paths and roads appeared naturally.