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John Carmack Joins Oculus VR As CTO
Guspaz writes "In a surprising move that in retrospect makes a lot of sense, Oculus VR has announced that John Carmack will be joining the company full-time as CTO. Carmack also tweeted that his time division would be 'Oculus over Id over Armadillo. Busy busy busy!'"
From the press release, quoting John Carmack: "I have fond memories of the development work that led to a lot of great things in modern gaming — the intensity of the first person experience, LAN and internet play, game mods, and so on. Duct taping a strap and hot gluing sensors onto Palmer's early prototype Rift and writing the code to drive it ranks right up there. Now is a special time. I believe that VR will have a huge impact in the coming years, but everyone working today is a pioneer. The paradigms that everyone will take for granted in the future are being figured out today; probably by people reading this message. It's certainly not there yet. There is a lot more work to do, and there are problems we don't even know about that will need to be solved, but I am eager to work on them. It's going to be awesome!"
How long has it been since Carmack had the chance to really get down and dirty with development work? Over the past few years it sounds like he's been chafing against the demands of corporate reality and yearning to get back to actually making cool stuff. Whether or not he is actually going to get a benefit out of a startup environment is debatable though (he has a sizable personal fortune).
Oculus Rift already looked promising before. With Carmack on-board, I now feel that the OR will be THE AWESOME MUST-HAVE GAME GADGET of 2014, or whenever it is released. ---- I'm definitely buying a RIFT when it comes out. And so will tens of thousands of other gaming enthusiasts, methinks!!! 5 thumbs up for this news!!!
Why did the chicken cross the road? Because Elon Musk put an AI chip in its head.
Occulus has success warranted, even if it by rare chance doesn't become a revolution on the way we play video games , it will be a revolution in the way we watch porn.
dribbling the remains of victims cadaver from its lusting mouth?
Still, the firepower may not be enough if you're slow.
Let us hope Oculus is faster at moving on, agressively.
My eyeballs are waiting.
Troll cares enough about it to hate it and expend energy complaining about it.
Virtual Reality was all the rage in the 90's but the tech wasn't really there to power it. I find it interesting to see the tech catching up after everyone (mostly) has let it fall off the radar...
Troll cares enough about it to hate it and expend energy complaining about it.
That's a lame argument and you know it. Stop using it. It convinces no one of anything. You can take an active disinterest in something, and express concern about excessive exposure. I don't think it's reasonable for the Rift, which is awesome, but you can do it without tacitly endorsing the subject matter.
...John Romero is still waiting to make somebody his bitch.
Suck it down.
But I have my doubts on Oculus VR's ability to use Google. For example, there are 500ppi displays available in Japan, yet Oculus doesn't know how to find them (hint, google 500ppi).
Frankly they need a minimum of a 500ppi display for this thing to be screen-door effect tolerable .. even if they layered a diffusion sheet to break it up.
For it to be perfect I don't see how they can do it with under 700ppi .. which may make it prohibitively expensive. Still for it to be a success in the mainstream 500ppi is the minimum.
Really? That's the big reason VR won't take off, in your opinion? "It looks douchey"? The appearance is completely 100% irrelevant: the device locks you out from the outside world (thats the point), which means it will always be used when you are alone, or with a group of people also wearing it, which means no one will even see you wearing it anyways. You do realize people aren't going to be wearing these things walking down the street, right? I ask, because given the rest of your comment, I'm not actually sure.
I mean this is not a new concept and the technology to make it happen has existed for 30 years. I don't agree that computer's were not powerful enough, BS. I don't agree that screens were not small enough, BS.
Well, you're wrong. Just, wrong. No other way to put it: completely 100% wrong. You need light weight low latency LCD displays (cheap enough for consumer-level equipment), which didn't exist until 4-5 years ago. You need GPUs powerful enough to run 1080p resolutions at 60fps or higher, with decent looking textures, which didn't exist till... well, actually, right about now. Real time 3D rendering didn't even exist 30 years ago in consumer hardware.
"None can love freedom heartily, but good men; the rest love not freedom, but license." --John Milton
Where, exactly, do you anticipate wearing them that how they make you look matters? Your argument about Google Glass is somewhat founded. But not Rift. Hell, the whole point of Rift is that if you and the other people in the room are all wearing them, to each other you look like the ripped manly warriors slaying Orcs in the forest rather than a bunch of flabby gamers waiting to cancer from the radon in your parents' basement.
What does it matter what you look like while you're doing VR? Seriously, who gives a crap?! In the future you'll probably do VR while lying on a bed or attached to a special chair anyway.
But wearing a big douchy snorkel like douchy headset is the douchy reason why douchy VR has never taken off in the douchy years ...
There, hope that helps. What the fuck is up with the rampant, vicious technophobia on slashdot?
weinersmith
VR for personal use so far has failed because the hardware was crap or unaffordable. I will buy an Oculus Rift and I don't care how it looks. I won't use it for an audience.
I worked for a company in college that put Wolfenstein 3d into a virtual reality arcade system. I met Carmack when he flew to Louisville KY to try it out (we were working on licensing agreements with id). We were using a Virtual Research Flight Helmet head mounted display with a Polhemus tracker mounted on top. Carmack seemed to enjoy it. He found our scan converter particularly amusing. This was a prototype and we needed an NTSC signal to drive the HUD and graphic cards that put out NTSC were very expensive at the time (Paradise VGA cards were something like $1500 at the time iirc). So we pointed a camcorder at a CRT monitor. It is very interesting to see him effectively entering that field now. I wonder if he even remembers seeing our product back then. The company never was able to sell any units at the astronomical price of $80,000 per unit (iirc) so the licensing deal never went anywhere. The company was Alternate Worlds Technology.
It's all part of the great dumbing down of Slashdot. The site used to be made up of seriously smart people, and now there are a ton of derpy reactionaries that respond poorly to just about everything.
Someone is pissy that they dont have $300 for an OR...
Do not look at laser with remaining good eye.
I deeply respect Carmack's work with regards to the engines he produces. With that being said, I hope this forces some dramatic changes at id software. They've been circling the toilet bowl for so long, not making a truly amazing game since the 90s. Hopefully they pick someone other than Tim Willits as lead for their next deathmatch-focused game so that we can get something fun again, rather than something overbalanced like Quake 3/Quake Live that is neither fun for newbies nor suitable for all types of competitive play (including team deathmatch and ctf and so on). Looking forward to the future!
I mean this is not a new concept and the technology to make it happen has existed for 30 years. I don't agree that computer's were not powerful enough, BS. I don't agree that screens were not small enough, BS.
>60 fps 3D rendering with lens distortion correction via pixel shader at greater than 1080p resolutions on sub-7" panel displays with a prospective sub-$300 price point?
Your issue with the aesthetics I'll grant you, as that's your opinion. But everything else you said is dead wrong and makes you look like an idiot.
wearing a big douchy snorkel
What kind of fucking douche says "douchy?"
Well they did look stupid. But the tech evolved into something streamlined and useful.
The Oculus Rift is much like the original brick phone. A couple generations on and VR goggles will be sleek, cheap and everywhere.
Is anyone else looking forward to using the Rift for non-gaming applications? The thing that excites me the most is replacing(well, complementing) my dual monitor setup with a 360Â desktop. I can't wait to have the extra desktop space available with a slight spin of my chair. Hell, you could even switch desktops by rolling your chair to the side or something. All I need is a keyboard/mouse tray attached to my chair.
http://www.masturbateforpeace.com/
Not the same direction. The industry just threw 3D TV at us and expected everyone to buy it. Nobody wanted it...not even while they were developing it. But in the case of the Rift...every gamer I know is just drooling over this thing. And so am I. Even if it makes me motion sick...I'll still throw out a few hundred dollars for it.
In theory the moderation system should take care of that. Just filter out everything below 2.
Usually when a group buys a software house headed by a 'famous' person, they get a few profitable titles from their purchase before the purchase contract allows the 'name' to move on. However, long before he sold id, Carmack had publicly stated he had ZERO interest in playing or developing AAA games. He proudly boasted he cared only for casual crap on the Wii that he could play with his kid, and rubbish hi-gimmick titles on the iPhone and the like.
The Doom3 engine had only ONE (read that again) licensee that wasn't a tame id development house- and that deal gave us the underwhelming 'Prey' that looked pretty much like Doom 3 and Quake 4. Bethesda actually picked up the rights to Prey 2 in the hope of finding work for its newly acquired id tech. Prey 2 turned out to be a disaster on the scale of Doom 4 and Rage 2. Needless to say, none of these 3 titles (on which Bethesda has spent a large fortune) seem likely to ever be released.
The core Rage tech, a dreadful dynamic tiling system that, as usual for Carmack, solved a 'problem' that had long vanished by the time Rage finally got a release, ruined any possible use Bethesda might have made of id's technology. Carmack never took account of either the pipeline by which artists produce their work, the need for proper real-time lighting, or the need for high-resolution in textures used for near, mid and far objects. All modern engines 'stream' textures in from a larger set than the memory of the GPU can currently handle. What Carmack idiotically proposed was a UNIQUE texture for every triangle in the game world.
Despite the obscene amount of time Carmack spent on Rage, Rage had massive texture repetition, caused by the artists simply rubber-stamping the same small textures over and over into the gigantic texture-map, and then smearing these duplicated textures a little to claim 'uniqueness'. This happened because the artists lacked the 'time' to 'paint' unique data onto the masses of geometry. Carmack's horrible approach requires the geometry for a level to be totally locked down, and only then can the artists begin their work. But most game design is ripping up and changing geometry all the time, so the artists MUST be able to do their work at the same time as the level designers are doing theirs.
Carmack didn't care. His tiling system was solving an intellectual problem, not a problem in AAA-game creation space. Carmack's algorithms are both genius and utterly unhelpful.
Borderlands 2, from Gearbox, schooled id on the proper way to do a 'Rage' like game. Gearbox had been one of the most mediocre developers, but a focus on how a game with the same 'setting' as Rage could be done properly, effectively, timely, and within a sane budget gave Gearbox a gigantic success, and a franchise that can only grow in the future. Gearbox used Unreal 3, of course.
Why would Bethesda not simply license the Unreal 3 engine for any projects they once believed their id tech could handle? Why use your own rubbish, when a much cheaper better solution is available externally? And Bethesda will have no problem recruiting people familiar with Unreal tools. Laughably, after Carmack had previously said "never", Bethesda forced id to release the 'tools' behind Rage in the hope of creating an external community of developers from which it might recruit. But this act could not change the reality of id tech being crap, and far more expensive than Unreal tech.
Bethesda's real problem is the need for an engine to do Fallout Next-Gen and Elder Scrolls Next-Gen. Banking on Unreal 4 to handle such continuous outdoor environments seems very risky- this was NEVER the strength or focus of Unreal tech. Their middleware used for Fallout 3 and Skyrim is creaky and completely unsuited for games post 2014. If they bought id for this purpose, the managers responsible need sacking, for it came as no surprise to any informed person that the tech behind Rage was completely unsuitable for large outdoor environments. Anyway, Bethesda acknowledged the uselessness of id tech for Fa
... here's an archive of them: http://floodyberry.com/carmack/plan.html
Does anyone use .plan files anymore?
That that is is that that that that is not is not.
...That way you could cover your peripheral vision. Imagine being in a darkened VR room with "something else" somewhere in the building and you keep seeing movement out the corner of your eye. I remember playing Doom 3 for the first time in a pitch black room with the surround sound cranked,it was the first game that made my arm hairs stand on end, VR would be awesome. I'd love to explore my 3D atomic virus models with this as well, it would make measuring and observing subtle changes so much easier. Awesome work guys, bring it on.
Yeah whatever, go sit in front of your CRT and carry on with your tan, I'll be in Tamriel hunting dragons.
There are three kinds of falsehood: the first is a 'fib,' the second is a downright lie, and the third is statistics.
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