Palmer has the title of “founder”, but he is not a C-level exec, AFAIK. I don’t think he has much to say in the day to day running of the company anymore. Even before the sale, it was Brendan Iribe (the CEO) who was mostly running the show from the business side, not Palmer.
Does ruining our reality help the sales of his VR headsets?
Marketing. Wouldn’t put it past them.
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The unsolved problems in VR really have very little to do with Facebook’s strengths in data aggregation and machine learning, though. Off the top of my head, VR’s biggest problems are:
- What games work well in VR, how to create them, and how to support multiple competing platforms with different APIs
- Mitigating motion/simulation sickness
- Mitigating/eliminating the “screen door” effect caused by the current display resolution
- Bringing down the cost of owning a rig capable of driving a VR headset, and lowering the cost of the headset itself
- Becoming entanglement-free by either ditching wires entirely or developing gaming hardware that you can comfortably wear
These are engineering challenges (for the most part), not something you can throw a bunch of machine learning algorithms at and magically get an answer. Facebook’s relevant strengths are its financial might (to buy developer investment in their headset over Valve’s) and its user base (to which it can market itself). Their software strengths are really pretty irrelevant to VR across the board, which is part of why their $2 billion acquisition of Oculus was seen as such an odd move at the time.
Valve is not exactly lacking in the resource department though. They own and operate the most popular gaming platform on the PC: Steam. They’ve already got a built-in distribution channel installed on millions of computers around the world, while Facebook is having to start from scratch with its Oculus Home software. Valve’s hardware partnership with HTC is potentially shakier because HTC’s financials are not exactly in a stellar place right now, but they can also start licensing their tech to other manufacturers if HTC goes belly-up (and I believe their long-term plan is for this to be an open platform).
From a presentation and performance standpoint, the devices are both virtually identical; fit and comfort are the only things I’ve seen people noting as a difference, and reviewers’ preferences are divided. From a hardware and platform perspective, the Vive is currently the more capable device. It supports room-scale VR (letting you walk around as opposed to staying seated), it includes a pair of tracked handheld controllers for interaction, and it includes a front-facing camera that will warn you if you’re going to run into a wall. Oculus is getting motion controls “soon” – though at a price that eliminates its competitive advantage over the Vive – and its room-scale VR implementation is still going to be much smaller in scope (3’ x 3’ versus Vive’s 11’ x 7’).
Facebook owning Oculus already meant that the Rift was a non-starter for me. I have no interest in furthering their existence because I find their privacy practices abhorrent. The cascade of broken promises that @jan_ciger mentioned are just further disincentives. Luckey’s pro-Trump shitlording simply cements that even if every other VR platform fails, Oculus will never get a dime out of me.
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The problem with the oculus is that it doesn’t have standardized manipulators quite yet. It used to be open enough that people could easily develop manipulators, but not really anymore.
While the Vive has manipulators that come standard and all the demos use them. It’s unfortunately limited just by volumetric concerns, but the manipulators already are hooked into a “teleport” api that all the demos seem to use where you can sort of shoot a portal at where you want to be, then push a button and suddenly your at that point in the virtual world.
All the demos I’ve seen of oculus stuff are meant to be done either sitting in a chair stationary, or otherwise in very large spaces. The vive is better suited to 100 square foot workspaces, and can also do the stationary sitting in a chair stuff just fine. And if you have a really big space to work in, you can set it up for that as well.
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I am now extremely pleased I didn’t buy the product.
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Oh, and both platforms only really work well in a First-person view. And the worst thing you can do with a game for VR right now is to pull the user out of FP into, say an over-the-shoulder view then force the character to do scripted movement, because that ends up simulating schizophrenia instead of a fun game.
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Well, but that is a general problem with VR.
VR pretty much means first person view, because the entire point of VR is to make you feel “being there” where you suspend the disbelief and your brain starts to think you are in a different place.
Now that doesn’t mean you can’t have a game or application where you use 3rd person perspective. You can - but not in the sense of console shooters where the camera is hovering “over the shoulder” of the hero (even though that has been done too - it feels a bit odd, though) but more like the user being the “God” over the scene. Think something in the style of Age of Empires or DOTA where the user is not directly embodied.
The scripted movement is a different issue - taking camera control from the user in VR is a big no-no, regardless of whether in first or third person view. It will make them motion sick. So the common “cut scenes” and “rail movements” used in games have to be rethought and replaced. That is more an issue of storytelling and scenarisation of the title than technology.
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Yeah. I’d expect that eventually you’ll be embodied in 3rd person view, and that virtual you will be controlling a console, so that you still feel like it’s first person so you don’t get sim-sick.
Like, maybe you’re playing an AoE type god-game, but your perspective is as like, someone in a spaceship or plane over the land.
everest vr. And apollo 11 vr. Both massively guilty of moving the player around in loooooong cutscenes that move your head. I can’t believe anyone liked them. Besides those games are like 80:20 cutscene:gameplay. Terrible way to do an experience in VR.
IIRC adding an “artificial nose” overlay to a VR game also helps. Makes the user feel like their head movements aren’t as disconnected from the game or something having a stationary visual reference. We don’t typically consciously notice our nose, but it’s always there in our field of view.
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The only thing that could make this guy even more sleazy is if he started investing in the pharma market.
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Used both - Vive is way better.
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Can they insert subliminal racist memes into the Virtual Reality?
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Yes. More realistically then ever.
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Jurassic Park has a bit of that exact thing.
On the tank simulator tech based theater, they show how they basically did pharma company work figuring out the DNA sequence of an animal cell
Using VR techniques with manipulators
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Not much 60Co in the average battery, fortunately. I remember a military rad hardness tester that basically banged two lumps of the stuff together to generate a pulse. The safety interlocks were…impressive.
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Elect Trump - he’ll nuke it from orbit! (and everything else)
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That still means the product and company are tainted, bro.
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I don’t see any actual product of this “shitposting” project other than a billboard saying “Too Big to Jail”.
(a) I don’t think that’s necessarily untrue.
(b) It is “racist” in the sense that “anything said in opposition to Hillary Clinton is objectively racist” which I would not ordinarily think a claim that any reasonable person would make, except that it’s already been made a couple of times on this site.
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Palmer Luckey is basically the nerd Justin Bieber-- a callow youth with too much money and not enough experience to not be an asshole about it.
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Oculus’ resource advantage from the tie-up with Facebook isn’t as insurmountable as one might think. Valve has oodles of cash, too (they take a 30% cut on a ridiculously large share of the PC gaming market); we just don’t know how much exactly because they’re a private company. Somewhat obviously, they also have existing relationships with all of the big-name developers, and a more developer-friendly reputation.
I was a Kickstarter backer for Oculus, and this news makes me regret that fact. I won’t support them with my money going forward.
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