7 ms·

This does not bode well for real VR surgery. Imagine if this were surgery day for someone, and because of an expiring certificate the rift shuts down ...

teawrecks 9y ago
It's not like a cert is necessary for it to function. A VR headset is basically a monitor you wear on your face. This is their own poor design choice that just ensures they're going to lose business of anyone who needs reliability in their headset.
- agar 9y ago
  The "monitor you wear on your face" trope is simply inaccurate, and essentially a misunderstanding of the state of VR today. I say this not to either criticize you or excuse the mistake by Oculus (they really needed to countersign their cert with a timestamp server), but to educate. These are non-obvious issues to people that don't follow the VR sector. Monitors work without low-level drivers because their maturity (and lack of innovation) allows the hard stuff to be embedded in the operating system. VR is not at that state; it is emergent, and the capability stacks require additional integration into the OS. Vendors frequently add unique features, and will continue to do so for some time, making standardization difficult. Even at its simplest level, a VR headset with 6 degrees of freedom is two monitors that must remain in absolute synchronization while also returning positional information to the CPU. This alone is enough to go beyond "standard monitor driver" functionality. But there's much more. Here is a paste of a comment I made elsewhere: Oculus (and Steam, via SteamVR) engineers a plethora of low-level code to reduce latency and add features. It's not just a monitor, but a whole set of SDKs, APIs, devices, and drivers. For the Rift, the hand controllers are wireless input devices refreshing at 1,000Hz; the sensors (to know where you are in the room) are USB devices with tight 60 fps synchronization to LEDs on the headset; there is a custom audio stack with spacialized audio and ambisonic sound; video needs specialized warping to correct lens distortion, interpolate frames, and maintain a 90 fps image, etc. Not to mention, the system creates a virtual monitor so you can see your 2D desktop while in VR. You can reach out and "grab" a window, rip it from the desktop and position it in your VR world. Pin it, and when you enter a game that window remains and is fully interactive with the Touch controllers emulating a mouse. Maybe you want to play Spotify in the background of a table tennis game, or be able to check a Discord screen while working through a puzzler, or watch YouTube videos while flying your ship in Elite:Dangerous. One guy set up a video feed from his baby monitor so he could watch his kid napping while in VR. This is obviously not a standard feature of the Windows compositor. All this needs to work across AMD and Nvidia, in Unity, Unreal, or any custom game engine. It's not off-the-shelf driver stuff. Not to mention, the premise that monitors don't have drivers is also mistaken. They may not be necessary, but they are available[1]. And, the decision to sign kernel drivers is not a poor choice by Oculus, but a mandate from Microsoft for Windows 10 build 1607 and above.[2] A cert is, indeed, necessary to function. Hope that was informative. [1] http://www.aocmonitorap.com/my/download_driver.php http://www.aocmonitorap.com/my/download_driver.php [2] "Starting with new installations of Windows 10, version 1607, Windows will not load any new kernel mode drivers which are not signed by the Dev Portal." - https://docs.microsoft.com/en-us/windows-hardware/drivers/install/kernel-mode-code-signing-policy--windows-vista-and-later- https://docs.microsoft.com/en-us/windows-hardware/drivers/in...
  - Eire_Banshee 9y ago
    Yeah but, certs are not necessary for the oculus rift to function.
    - WillPostForFood 9y ago
      Drivers are necessary for the rift to function, and certs are necessary for drivers to function.
      - vetinari 9y ago
        The signature of the driver doesn't expire when the certificate used does.
        agar 9y ago
        See my other comment replying to someone in parallel to this one.
        vetinari 9y ago
        Thanks.
      - superkuh 9y ago
        This is why half of the blame lies with Microsoft for following the rest of the industry into making software for grandma's protection at the detriment of software freedoms. An enterprising user can turn off these driver signing enforcement settings but it's quite a song and dance and first you have to even be aware of it.
        scoon1329 9y ago
        The industry makes software for grandma's protection so that grandma can feel like she is safe using a computer to talk to her grandchildren. In other words, the industry does this to try and make computing more accessible to a non-specialist audience. I don't see why this is a bad thing.
HeyLaughingBoy 9y ago
As a medical device, I would expect that this possibility would have been caught very early on in one of any number of Failure Analysis meetings and mitigated by the time the device made it to the (FDA) certification process.
- lostlogin 9y ago
  I’m going to assume you haven’t used many bits of medical equipment, because doing it for a job leads me to conclude that the software is more flakey than standard commercial software used day to day. Low sales volumes do not make for budgets high enough to support good debugging and development I guess.
  - HeyLaughingBoy 9y ago
    I haven't worked in a medical lab (where our instruments were generally used). But I was a software developer for various medical devices for over 15 years and my conclusion was exactly the opposite: the software was far, far more robust than most commercial software.
    - lostlogin 9y ago
      It wasn’t radiology then (which would be the rough limit of my knowledge). PACs, MRI, CT, RIS, Angio gear, image intensifiers etc. All used over many years with weird glitches, reproducible errors including complete system crashes that take hours to get back and across several vendors.
- mattnewport 9y ago
  Our product is a training aid for medical professionals and is not regulated as a medical device, in the same way that a flight simulator is not regulated as an aircraft.
  - HeyLaughingBoy 9y ago
    Oh, I got that. I was replying to the person who was wondering what would happen if it was being used for actual surgery.
pbhjpbhj 9y ago
You'd pay lots of money to get immediate high-level support ... investors will love it!
dzamo_norton 9y ago
Then you fall back to normal surgery.

teawrecks 9y ago

It's not like a cert is necessary for it to function. A VR headset is basically a monitor you wear on your face. This is their own poor design choice that just ensures they're going to lose business of anyone who needs reliability in their headset.

agar 9y ago
The "monitor you wear on your face" trope is simply inaccurate, and essentially a misunderstanding of the state of VR today. I say this not to either criticize you or excuse the mistake by Oculus (they really needed to countersign their cert with a timestamp server), but to educate. These are non-obvious issues to people that don't follow the VR sector. Monitors work without low-level drivers because their maturity (and lack of innovation) allows the hard stuff to be embedded in the operating system. VR is not at that state; it is emergent, and the capability stacks require additional integration into the OS. Vendors frequently add unique features, and will continue to do so for some time, making standardization difficult. Even at its simplest level, a VR headset with 6 degrees of freedom is two monitors that must remain in absolute synchronization while also returning positional information to the CPU. This alone is enough to go beyond "standard monitor driver" functionality. But there's much more. Here is a paste of a comment I made elsewhere: Oculus (and Steam, via SteamVR) engineers a plethora of low-level code to reduce latency and add features. It's not just a monitor, but a whole set of SDKs, APIs, devices, and drivers. For the Rift, the hand controllers are wireless input devices refreshing at 1,000Hz; the sensors (to know where you are in the room) are USB devices with tight 60 fps synchronization to LEDs on the headset; there is a custom audio stack with spacialized audio and ambisonic sound; video needs specialized warping to correct lens distortion, interpolate frames, and maintain a 90 fps image, etc. Not to mention, the system creates a virtual monitor so you can see your 2D desktop while in VR. You can reach out and "grab" a window, rip it from the desktop and position it in your VR world. Pin it, and when you enter a game that window remains and is fully interactive with the Touch controllers emulating a mouse. Maybe you want to play Spotify in the background of a table tennis game, or be able to check a Discord screen while working through a puzzler, or watch YouTube videos while flying your ship in Elite:Dangerous. One guy set up a video feed from his baby monitor so he could watch his kid napping while in VR. This is obviously not a standard feature of the Windows compositor. All this needs to work across AMD and Nvidia, in Unity, Unreal, or any custom game engine. It's not off-the-shelf driver stuff. Not to mention, the premise that monitors don't have drivers is also mistaken. They may not be necessary, but they are available[1]. And, the decision to sign kernel drivers is not a poor choice by Oculus, but a mandate from Microsoft for Windows 10 build 1607 and above.[2] A cert is, indeed, necessary to function. Hope that was informative. [1] http://www.aocmonitorap.com/my/download_driver.php http://www.aocmonitorap.com/my/download_driver.php [2] "Starting with new installations of Windows 10, version 1607, Windows will not load any new kernel mode drivers which are not signed by the Dev Portal." - https://docs.microsoft.com/en-us/windows-hardware/drivers/install/kernel-mode-code-signing-policy--windows-vista-and-later- https://docs.microsoft.com/en-us/windows-hardware/drivers/in...
- Eire_Banshee 9y ago
  Yeah but, certs are not necessary for the oculus rift to function.
  - WillPostForFood 9y ago
    Drivers are necessary for the rift to function, and certs are necessary for drivers to function.
    - vetinari 9y ago
      The signature of the driver doesn't expire when the certificate used does.
      - agar 9y ago
        See my other comment replying to someone in parallel to this one.
        vetinari 9y ago
        Thanks.
    - superkuh 9y ago
      This is why half of the blame lies with Microsoft for following the rest of the industry into making software for grandma's protection at the detriment of software freedoms. An enterprising user can turn off these driver signing enforcement settings but it's quite a song and dance and first you have to even be aware of it.
      - scoon1329 9y ago
        The industry makes software for grandma's protection so that grandma can feel like she is safe using a computer to talk to her grandchildren. In other words, the industry does this to try and make computing more accessible to a non-specialist audience. I don't see why this is a bad thing.

HeyLaughingBoy 9y ago

As a medical device, I would expect that this possibility would have been caught very early on in one of any number of Failure Analysis meetings and mitigated by the time the device made it to the (FDA) certification process.

lostlogin 9y ago
I’m going to assume you haven’t used many bits of medical equipment, because doing it for a job leads me to conclude that the software is more flakey than standard commercial software used day to day. Low sales volumes do not make for budgets high enough to support good debugging and development I guess.
- HeyLaughingBoy 9y ago
  I haven't worked in a medical lab (where our instruments were generally used). But I was a software developer for various medical devices for over 15 years and my conclusion was exactly the opposite: the software was far, far more robust than most commercial software.
  - lostlogin 9y ago
    It wasn’t radiology then (which would be the rough limit of my knowledge). PACs, MRI, CT, RIS, Angio gear, image intensifiers etc. All used over many years with weird glitches, reproducible errors including complete system crashes that take hours to get back and across several vendors.
mattnewport 9y ago
Our product is a training aid for medical professionals and is not regulated as a medical device, in the same way that a flight simulator is not regulated as an aircraft.
- HeyLaughingBoy 9y ago
  Oh, I got that. I was replying to the person who was wondering what would happen if it was being used for actual surgery.

pbhjpbhj 9y ago

You'd pay lots of money to get immediate high-level support ... investors will love it!

dzamo_norton 9y ago

Then you fall back to normal surgery.