9 ms·

Keynote by John Carmack at Oculus Connect 2014 [video]

291 points by ivank 12y ago

webwielder 12y ago
Perhaps even more impressive than Carmack's technical chops is his ability to stand in a single spot for hours on end.
- rmcpherson 12y ago
  Without a podium, he does look absurdly immobile on that large stage.
- 31reasons 12y ago
  Because all the cycles are allocated to the verbal system rendering motor system immobile.
  - omegant 12y ago
    I almost chocked when reading this.
- morkfromork 12y ago
  He moves but, is too fast for the camera speed.
  - mlvljr 12y ago
    No, the trick is just that he is interlacing himself, didn't you notice?? (otherwise he would flicker, obviously)
  - azernik 12y ago
    John Carmack facts!
  - DonHopkins 12y ago
    He takes bathroom breaks during vertical refresh.
- ckeck 12y ago
  I was always impressed by this during several of his keynotes at QuakeCon the past few years. I believe it was 2012 when he was standing next to the chair talking and didn't seem to flinch for almost 2 hours straight.
gnarbarian 12y ago
Carmack has been a hero of mine since the mid 90s. He was also the inspiration for me to go into computer science. Always a pleasure to listen to such a technically dense talk on the cutting edge of a subject dear to me. I highly recommend his quake-con keynotes as well for those of you who like this video.
Laremere 12y ago
I love it when John Carmack talks, because he doesn't do marketing speak, and he doesn't dumb down his content. It's just a brain dump of technical info until they (almost literally) kick him off the stage.
- naiyt 12y ago
  I also love his enthusiasm for whatever he's talking about. Every time I listen to him I suddenly feel motivated to go and write a bunch of code.
iamshs 12y ago
I am only 10 minutes into this talk, but John is one awesome speaker. No PR talk at all, he is speaking his mind freely and in fact started with shortcomings of the product. The segue between different sections is so smooth. I do not have background in VR, but he explains things so smoothly. He is just freely talking about supply chain, and what the product constitutes. And he has been standing in the same spot. What a genuine speaker. Also, looks like Facebook's influence has been minimal. There is just no iota of bullshit in him. I like him already. My first John Carmack video, and I am already hooked. Now onto watching the full video.
- ramidarigaz 12y ago
  If you liked his talk, definitely check out his QuakeCon keynotes and his talk about physically based lighting. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wt-iVFxgFWk https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wt-iVFxgFWk https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Uooh0Y9fC_M https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Uooh0Y9fC_M https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=IyUgHPs86XM https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=IyUgHPs86XM
  - Sammi 12y ago
    I've watched the one on lighting twice, just cause it blew my mind so much. I finally (think I) understand light.
    - DonHopkins 12y ago
      When I first read that, I thought "lighting" was some kind of mind altering drug. It is, if you do it right! ;)
  - iamshs 12y ago
    I finished watching first one, and my admiration for him grows even more. Immense knowledge with a gift of presenting mere facts. What a likable personality. Thanks for the links.
- Ronsenshi 12y ago
  What's great about his talks is how smooth they are. I'm not sure if that's a good analogy, but his talks are like waves in the sea. They are rolling from one topic to the other, nice and clean. That's what it looks like when person knows what he's talking about and quite passionate about it - such person wants to share his thoughts and experiences.
jayavanth 12y ago
Michael Abrash's keynote is worth checking out! https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=KS4yEyt5Qes https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=KS4yEyt5Qes
- canadev 12y ago
  Thanks for the link. I'll probably end up watching this. I watched the Carmack talk as well. Small note, but some things that kind of annoy me: 1. Audio sync issues -- the mouths and the words don't line up. I may just download the video and use the Audio Delay tool in VLC to watch it. 2. Start time of the talk: in this video you've just linked, the presentation doesn't even begin till like 6 mins in. Somewhat similar issue on the original video... EDIT: Download link for the Abrash video: http://www.clipconverter.cc/download/pwvblTMb/123146223/ http://www.clipconverter.cc/download/pwvblTMb/123146223/ Download link for the Carmack video: http://www.clipconverter.cc/download/ecJvSoeC/123169959/ http://www.clipconverter.cc/download/ecJvSoeC/123169959/ EDIT: Here's the "Bar/Far" video clip that Abrash showed, it was badly out of sync for me when I watched the presentation, but you can see it here: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=FefFfvriAwQ#t=64 http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=FefFfvriAwQ#t=64 And here's the side-by-side: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=FefFfvriAwQ#t=149 http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=FefFfvriAwQ#t=149 Pretty amazing.
Vanayad 12y ago
Can anyone tl;dr the new stuff in this version of the oculus prototype ?
- modeless 12y ago
  Lighter, higher resolution, higher frame rate, better lenses, larger tracking volume, 360 degree tracking, and built-in headphones. The resolution and frame rate are likely close if not identical to what the first consumer Oculus headset will have next year.
  - azernik 12y ago
    Not just built-in headphones, but also built-in positional audio APIs (possibly with hardware acceleration?)
Vanayad 12y ago
Can anyone tl;dr the new stuff in this version of the oculus prototype ?
asadlionpk 12y ago
Just finished watching, I am impressed at how low-level/technical he can get without boring or confusing the audience. I have some experience with technical speaking and its very hard to make a technical point without dumbing it down for the audience.
lucasgw 12y ago
I was in the room - he is a truly dynamic speaker and obviously a super-intelligent guy. I think he went off the rails a bit with the suggestion of interlacing as a potential solution. That makes little sense to me. It's, at best, a short-term solution once you get fast enough displays and rendering. (And as an old-time video guy... just... god, please... no...)
- fezz 12y ago
  Interlace is a total hack solution for short term gain. Do it right from the start and HW can target right goals. If it's just for mobile, then it's still a hack for mobile that will infect everything else. At the very least, non-structured patterns which our eyes fixate on, should be used to subsample images to deal with the bandwidth, power, rendering limitations. It seems as though the facebook "must have a mobile solution" virus has infected Oculus and instead of taking the path of proving a successful product at a smaller pc/console quantities first, they're going for the whole "mobile" enchilada with all the requisite hack solutions.
  - zeen 12y ago
    Do it right how exactly? Oculus doesn't manufacture the hardware in question. Oculus is very much at the mercy of the smartphone display market. The only thing Oculus/Carmack can do is convince Samsung, and unless the change can impact the smartphone display market, Samsung is highly unlikely to be interested. Unless you are suggesting Oculus get into the display manufacturing business? That's certainly interesting, but would probably add several years to their release timeline.
    - CamperBob2 12y ago
      Oculus is very much at the mercy of the smartphone display market. At some point, normally before somebody spends $2 billion dollars, that stops being a valid excuse in the hardware business.
      - pkroll 12y ago
lilymuki 12y ago
https://uradura.wordpress.com/2014/09/20/hdfd-buffalo-bills-vs-san-diego-chargers-live-stream-watch-here-nfl-online-hd-and-enjoy-full-season-nfl-ffh5/ https://uradura.wordpress.com/2014/09/20/hdfd-buffalo-bills-... https://uradura.wordpress.com/2014/09/20/hdfd-buffalo-bills-vs-san-diego-chargers-live-stream-watch-here-nfl-online-hd-and-enjoy-full-season-nfl-ffh5/ https://uradura.wordpress.com/2014/09/20/hdfd-buffalo-bills-...
lilymuki 12y ago
https://uradura.wordpress.com/2014/09/20/hdfd-buffalo-bills-vs-san-diego-chargers-live-stream-watch-here-nfl-online-hd-and-enjoy-full-season-nfl-ffh5/ https://uradura.wordpress.com/2014/09/20/hdfd-buffalo-bills-...
walterbell 12y ago
Nice use of keynote to directly present requirements to engineers throughout the display supply chain, especially in large companies like Samsung.
vertis 12y ago
This keynote was by far the highlight of the entire conference for me Second were the amazing demos on the Crescent Bay prototype
Morcane 12y ago
I just want to see a release date for the consumer Rift already, it's getting annoying.
bsaul 12y ago
Anyone's got a link to the slidedeck ?
- Strom 12y ago
  There are no slides, as per usual for Carmack talks.
Sicp 12y ago
I understood nothing.
Sicp 12y ago
I understood nothing.
riffraff 12y ago
Sorry for the somewhat lame question, but is he always that still? I'm 10 minutes in and I don't think he moved his feet once, and his right hand just a couple times. It feels very weird for me to watch and I just noticed it now, is there something wrong with me?
- deleted 12y ago
  [deleted]
- ufo 12y ago
  Yes, its usually like that. He might sit down after a couple of hours though.
deleted 12y ago
[deleted]
Kenji 12y ago
Nothing Carmack does is ever boring. This man is a huge inspiration for me.
justifier 12y ago
it becomes its own form of marketing speech, carmack was the reason i got involved: financially, temporally, and mentally; and i think the organisation understands this as common for a number of people.. especially 'developers' the oculus is digital stereoscopy which is hard with simple stationary fixed objects(i), but combine it with inferred spherical screen encapsulation and it becomes a real challenge, probably a fun one too you let carmack wax poetic on his interesting ideas to fix this tech and he will talk about latency and hertz and i'll listen with bated breath because i like hearing people talk about solutions to problems but then i put the headset on and i realise these are hardly the problems befallen the proposed goal i want someone to address that piece of a person that is lost when they put the headset on for the first time, it almost appears physical when you see it waft out of them i lost it, my gamer friend who already preemptively developed a defensive cyncism to the tech lost it, the eleven year old i introduce hacking to lost it, and that last one was probably the most signifigant for me to see i had been using the object sitting on top of my bookshelf as an incentivising mechanism: 'finish your project and i'll let you use the oculus'; last week he pushed his finished project but i had other obligations the following week so he had to wait 'two! whole! weeks!' to get to use the oculus when i picked him up the following week, uncharacteristically early this time.. we both are lax in our punctuallity but he refused to let me be late today so he came directly to me fifteen minutes early.. he went on and on about how he has been 'scared' all day:'scared, but like happy scared'; i tried to explain to him the concept of anxiety but his mind was hurling itself around all of what he was about to become witness to i put the headset on him and he had fun with it, but when he took it off he became suddenly very pragmatic in his demeanor, he told me he thinks it hurt him, his head, his eyes, something.. he needed a glass of water, i explained that that was because instead of being a virtual reality in which he was transposed to the thing exploits an optical illusion which means your brain is doing a lot more work than it usually does trying to rectify the inconsistencies, if you've ever been frustrated by trying to see a sailboat in a magic eye you know what it feels like to use the oculus i asked him his opinion:'honestly? ..well, unfortunately a little dissappointed'; i see my position as creating a safe environment for him to develop his ideas so naturally i challenged him to explain himself by defending the technological feat that he was holding in his hand, but the only thing we could talk about quickly became anything other than what we wanted to talk about so we talked about the tech, i started going all carmack on him and we had fun talking tech but the conversation was clearly avoiding talking about the 'experience' one develops when wearing the headset i wanted to know what he lost, and asked him to describe the thing he thought it was going to be, he was unable:'i don't know, just different, like? more 3d`ish'; in fashion i told him to explain himself explicitly stead superficially:'but what does that mean? what did you think it was going to be? describe that to me'; 'i don't know anymore' this i understood, but my experience was different, after wearing the headset i started to dream up better ways to do what i thought they were trying to do before i put it on, ways to do what i wanted from virtual reality, they are dreams and some built on the sort of technological feats of dreams but this was and still is my reaction each time i wear it so yes john, tell me all about your brilliant ideas for fixing latency issues because this stuff is fun, but please acknowledge the baseline of this research is fundamentally flawed as it pertains to the proposed goals i've stopped calling the oculus virtual reality, the oculus is digital stereoscopy . . . . (i) the first thing i did with the oculus was pull up two terminals, cat out some of my writing, align vertically, then slowly move one terminal into the field of view of the other eye until the text seemed to stop wonking my brain and really pop out at me the experience was profound so, i threw together a little browser playground with two 117px squares, one blue and one pink, i aligned them vertically then again slowly moved one into the field of view of the other eye, and i waited until those two distinct colors overlaid in my mind as a single purple herein lies the problem: there was a multi pixel range where my brain would close the gap manually, out of my control and rather forcibly; it was impossible for me to find the perfect distance between the two divs, 340pxs worked but so did plus or minus 4px from 344px, the perfect'exact`preferred`innate distance was undiscoverable because of the exception handling in my brain's interpretation of my visual input .. edit:: gramm`err
asciimo 12y ago
While listening to all of the mitigation strategies that Carmack proposed for the technological challenges, I wondered if you could hack the user. What about drugs? Is there something that can reduce our sensitivity to low-frequency displays and yaw lag? At the very least, motion sickness drugs?
- Synaesthesia 12y ago
  I'm sure there is, anti-emetic medication like Valoid really helps with nausea, and Cannabis can alleviate nausea and discomfort tremendously. But ideally we want to solve these problems in hardware, rather than wetware of course.
pfh 12y ago
This seems to be the wrangling Bruce Sterling is recently talking about[1]. John Carmack is brilliant, but a lot of what he's doing here is using his reputation and technical skill to get people and companies all pulling in the same direction. This isn't something a start-up in a garage could do. [1] http://boingboing.net/2014/09/13/bruce-sterlings-the-epic-s.html http://boingboing.net/2014/09/13/bruce-sterlings-the-epic-s....
Jacky800 12y ago
John Carmack is great technical speaker. His interesting thoughts flows in a continuous stream and as a listener its almost impossible to get distracted. I wish Carmack does an interview like the one in "Coders at work" format where we can get some insight on How he approaches debugging, what tools he uses apart from visual studio. How does he approaches already existing large code base? What is the optimal duration to code without interruption. What techniques does he use to get in to flow state e.t.c..

291 points by ivank 12y ago

webwielder 12y ago

Perhaps even more impressive than Carmack's technical chops is his ability to stand in a single spot for hours on end.

rmcpherson 12y ago
Without a podium, he does look absurdly immobile on that large stage.
31reasons 12y ago
Because all the cycles are allocated to the verbal system rendering motor system immobile.
- omegant 12y ago
  I almost chocked when reading this.
morkfromork 12y ago
He moves but, is too fast for the camera speed.
- mlvljr 12y ago
  No, the trick is just that he is interlacing himself, didn't you notice?? (otherwise he would flicker, obviously)
- azernik 12y ago
  John Carmack facts!
- DonHopkins 12y ago
  He takes bathroom breaks during vertical refresh.
ckeck 12y ago
I was always impressed by this during several of his keynotes at QuakeCon the past few years. I believe it was 2012 when he was standing next to the chair talking and didn't seem to flinch for almost 2 hours straight.

gnarbarian 12y ago

Carmack has been a hero of mine since the mid 90s. He was also the inspiration for me to go into computer science. Always a pleasure to listen to such a technically dense talk on the cutting edge of a subject dear to me. I highly recommend his quake-con keynotes as well for those of you who like this video.

Laremere 12y ago

I love it when John Carmack talks, because he doesn't do marketing speak, and he doesn't dumb down his content. It's just a brain dump of technical info until they (almost literally) kick him off the stage.

naiyt 12y ago
I also love his enthusiasm for whatever he's talking about. Every time I listen to him I suddenly feel motivated to go and write a bunch of code.

iamshs 12y ago

I am only 10 minutes into this talk, but John is one awesome speaker. No PR talk at all, he is speaking his mind freely and in fact started with shortcomings of the product. The segue between different sections is so smooth. I do not have background in VR, but he explains things so smoothly. He is just freely talking about supply chain, and what the product constitutes. And he has been standing in the same spot. What a genuine speaker. Also, looks like Facebook's influence has been minimal. There is just no iota of bullshit in him. I like him already. My first John Carmack video, and I am already hooked. Now onto watching the full video.

ramidarigaz 12y ago
If you liked his talk, definitely check out his QuakeCon keynotes and his talk about physically based lighting. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wt-iVFxgFWk https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wt-iVFxgFWk https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Uooh0Y9fC_M https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Uooh0Y9fC_M https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=IyUgHPs86XM https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=IyUgHPs86XM
- Sammi 12y ago
  I've watched the one on lighting twice, just cause it blew my mind so much. I finally (think I) understand light.
  - DonHopkins 12y ago
    When I first read that, I thought "lighting" was some kind of mind altering drug. It is, if you do it right! ;)
- iamshs 12y ago
  I finished watching first one, and my admiration for him grows even more. Immense knowledge with a gift of presenting mere facts. What a likable personality. Thanks for the links.
Ronsenshi 12y ago
What's great about his talks is how smooth they are. I'm not sure if that's a good analogy, but his talks are like waves in the sea. They are rolling from one topic to the other, nice and clean. That's what it looks like when person knows what he's talking about and quite passionate about it - such person wants to share his thoughts and experiences.

jayavanth 12y ago

Michael Abrash's keynote is worth checking out! https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=KS4yEyt5Qes https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=KS4yEyt5Qes

canadev 12y ago
Thanks for the link. I'll probably end up watching this. I watched the Carmack talk as well. Small note, but some things that kind of annoy me: 1. Audio sync issues -- the mouths and the words don't line up. I may just download the video and use the Audio Delay tool in VLC to watch it. 2. Start time of the talk: in this video you've just linked, the presentation doesn't even begin till like 6 mins in. Somewhat similar issue on the original video... EDIT: Download link for the Abrash video: http://www.clipconverter.cc/download/pwvblTMb/123146223/ http://www.clipconverter.cc/download/pwvblTMb/123146223/ Download link for the Carmack video: http://www.clipconverter.cc/download/ecJvSoeC/123169959/ http://www.clipconverter.cc/download/ecJvSoeC/123169959/ EDIT: Here's the "Bar/Far" video clip that Abrash showed, it was badly out of sync for me when I watched the presentation, but you can see it here: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=FefFfvriAwQ#t=64 http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=FefFfvriAwQ#t=64 And here's the side-by-side: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=FefFfvriAwQ#t=149 http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=FefFfvriAwQ#t=149 Pretty amazing.

Vanayad 12y ago

Can anyone tl;dr the new stuff in this version of the oculus prototype ?

modeless 12y ago
Lighter, higher resolution, higher frame rate, better lenses, larger tracking volume, 360 degree tracking, and built-in headphones. The resolution and frame rate are likely close if not identical to what the first consumer Oculus headset will have next year.
- azernik 12y ago
  Not just built-in headphones, but also built-in positional audio APIs (possibly with hardware acceleration?)

Vanayad 12y ago

Can anyone tl;dr the new stuff in this version of the oculus prototype ?

asadlionpk 12y ago

Just finished watching, I am impressed at how low-level/technical he can get without boring or confusing the audience. I have some experience with technical speaking and its very hard to make a technical point without dumbing it down for the audience.

lucasgw 12y ago

I was in the room - he is a truly dynamic speaker and obviously a super-intelligent guy. I think he went off the rails a bit with the suggestion of interlacing as a potential solution. That makes little sense to me. It's, at best, a short-term solution once you get fast enough displays and rendering. (And as an old-time video guy... just... god, please... no...)

fezz 12y ago
Interlace is a total hack solution for short term gain. Do it right from the start and HW can target right goals. If it's just for mobile, then it's still a hack for mobile that will infect everything else. At the very least, non-structured patterns which our eyes fixate on, should be used to subsample images to deal with the bandwidth, power, rendering limitations. It seems as though the facebook "must have a mobile solution" virus has infected Oculus and instead of taking the path of proving a successful product at a smaller pc/console quantities first, they're going for the whole "mobile" enchilada with all the requisite hack solutions.
- zeen 12y ago
  Do it right how exactly? Oculus doesn't manufacture the hardware in question. Oculus is very much at the mercy of the smartphone display market. The only thing Oculus/Carmack can do is convince Samsung, and unless the change can impact the smartphone display market, Samsung is highly unlikely to be interested. Unless you are suggesting Oculus get into the display manufacturing business? That's certainly interesting, but would probably add several years to their release timeline.
  - CamperBob2 12y ago
    Oculus is very much at the mercy of the smartphone display market. At some point, normally before somebody spends $2 billion dollars, that stops being a valid excuse in the hardware business.
    - pkroll 12y ago

lilymuki 12y ago

https://uradura.wordpress.com/2014/09/20/hdfd-buffalo-bills-vs-san-diego-chargers-live-stream-watch-here-nfl-online-hd-and-enjoy-full-season-nfl-ffh5/ https://uradura.wordpress.com/2014/09/20/hdfd-buffalo-bills-... https://uradura.wordpress.com/2014/09/20/hdfd-buffalo-bills-vs-san-diego-chargers-live-stream-watch-here-nfl-online-hd-and-enjoy-full-season-nfl-ffh5/ https://uradura.wordpress.com/2014/09/20/hdfd-buffalo-bills-...

lilymuki 12y ago

walterbell 12y ago

Nice use of keynote to directly present requirements to engineers throughout the display supply chain, especially in large companies like Samsung.

vertis 12y ago

This keynote was by far the highlight of the entire conference for me Second were the amazing demos on the Crescent Bay prototype

Morcane 12y ago

I just want to see a release date for the consumer Rift already, it's getting annoying.

bsaul 12y ago

Anyone's got a link to the slidedeck ?

Strom 12y ago
There are no slides, as per usual for Carmack talks.

Sicp 12y ago

I understood nothing.

Sicp 12y ago

I understood nothing.

riffraff 12y ago

Sorry for the somewhat lame question, but is he always that still? I'm 10 minutes in and I don't think he moved his feet once, and his right hand just a couple times. It feels very weird for me to watch and I just noticed it now, is there something wrong with me?

deleted 12y ago
[deleted]
ufo 12y ago
Yes, its usually like that. He might sit down after a couple of hours though.

deleted 12y ago

[deleted]

Kenji 12y ago

Nothing Carmack does is ever boring. This man is a huge inspiration for me.

justifier 12y ago

it becomes its own form of marketing speech, carmack was the reason i got involved: financially, temporally, and mentally; and i think the organisation understands this as common for a number of people.. especially 'developers' the oculus is digital stereoscopy which is hard with simple stationary fixed objects(i), but combine it with inferred spherical screen encapsulation and it becomes a real challenge, probably a fun one too you let carmack wax poetic on his interesting ideas to fix this tech and he will talk about latency and hertz and i'll listen with bated breath because i like hearing people talk about solutions to problems but then i put the headset on and i realise these are hardly the problems befallen the proposed goal i want someone to address that piece of a person that is lost when they put the headset on for the first time, it almost appears physical when you see it waft out of them i lost it, my gamer friend who already preemptively developed a defensive cyncism to the tech lost it, the eleven year old i introduce hacking to lost it, and that last one was probably the most signifigant for me to see i had been using the object sitting on top of my bookshelf as an incentivising mechanism: 'finish your project and i'll let you use the oculus'; last week he pushed his finished project but i had other obligations the following week so he had to wait 'two! whole! weeks!' to get to use the oculus when i picked him up the following week, uncharacteristically early this time.. we both are lax in our punctuallity but he refused to let me be late today so he came directly to me fifteen minutes early.. he went on and on about how he has been 'scared' all day:'scared, but like happy scared'; i tried to explain to him the concept of anxiety but his mind was hurling itself around all of what he was about to become witness to i put the headset on him and he had fun with it, but when he took it off he became suddenly very pragmatic in his demeanor, he told me he thinks it hurt him, his head, his eyes, something.. he needed a glass of water, i explained that that was because instead of being a virtual reality in which he was transposed to the thing exploits an optical illusion which means your brain is doing a lot more work than it usually does trying to rectify the inconsistencies, if you've ever been frustrated by trying to see a sailboat in a magic eye you know what it feels like to use the oculus i asked him his opinion:'honestly? ..well, unfortunately a little dissappointed'; i see my position as creating a safe environment for him to develop his ideas so naturally i challenged him to explain himself by defending the technological feat that he was holding in his hand, but the only thing we could talk about quickly became anything other than what we wanted to talk about so we talked about the tech, i started going all carmack on him and we had fun talking tech but the conversation was clearly avoiding talking about the 'experience' one develops when wearing the headset i wanted to know what he lost, and asked him to describe the thing he thought it was going to be, he was unable:'i don't know, just different, like? more 3d`ish'; in fashion i told him to explain himself explicitly stead superficially:'but what does that mean? what did you think it was going to be? describe that to me'; 'i don't know anymore' this i understood, but my experience was different, after wearing the headset i started to dream up better ways to do what i thought they were trying to do before i put it on, ways to do what i wanted from virtual reality, they are dreams and some built on the sort of technological feats of dreams but this was and still is my reaction each time i wear it so yes john, tell me all about your brilliant ideas for fixing latency issues because this stuff is fun, but please acknowledge the baseline of this research is fundamentally flawed as it pertains to the proposed goals i've stopped calling the oculus virtual reality, the oculus is digital stereoscopy . . . . (i) the first thing i did with the oculus was pull up two terminals, cat out some of my writing, align vertically, then slowly move one terminal into the field of view of the other eye until the text seemed to stop wonking my brain and really pop out at me the experience was profound so, i threw together a little browser playground with two 117px squares, one blue and one pink, i aligned them vertically then again slowly moved one into the field of view of the other eye, and i waited until those two distinct colors overlaid in my mind as a single purple herein lies the problem: there was a multi pixel range where my brain would close the gap manually, out of my control and rather forcibly; it was impossible for me to find the perfect distance between the two divs, 340pxs worked but so did plus or minus 4px from 344px, the perfect'exact`preferred`innate distance was undiscoverable because of the exception handling in my brain's interpretation of my visual input .. edit:: gramm`err

asciimo 12y ago

While listening to all of the mitigation strategies that Carmack proposed for the technological challenges, I wondered if you could hack the user. What about drugs? Is there something that can reduce our sensitivity to low-frequency displays and yaw lag? At the very least, motion sickness drugs?

Synaesthesia 12y ago
I'm sure there is, anti-emetic medication like Valoid really helps with nausea, and Cannabis can alleviate nausea and discomfort tremendously. But ideally we want to solve these problems in hardware, rather than wetware of course.

pfh 12y ago

This seems to be the wrangling Bruce Sterling is recently talking about[1]. John Carmack is brilliant, but a lot of what he's doing here is using his reputation and technical skill to get people and companies all pulling in the same direction. This isn't something a start-up in a garage could do. [1] http://boingboing.net/2014/09/13/bruce-sterlings-the-epic-s.html http://boingboing.net/2014/09/13/bruce-sterlings-the-epic-s....

Jacky800 12y ago

John Carmack is great technical speaker. His interesting thoughts flows in a continuous stream and as a listener its almost impossible to get distracted. I wish Carmack does an interview like the one in "Coders at work" format where we can get some insight on How he approaches debugging, what tools he uses apart from visual studio. How does he approaches already existing large code base? What is the optimal duration to code without interruption. What techniques does he use to get in to flow state e.t.c..