Slashdot Mirror
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).
I love my rift, I just got it, but John Carmack's existence won't magically cure the motion sickness. For "real games" and not tech-demos, I can play maybe a half hour of rift at a time, before I have to go lie down.
...John Romero is still waiting to make somebody his bitch.
Suck it down.
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
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.
Yes it can, increased response and speeds will eliminate it. It's the lag that is making you a puke fountain
Disclaimer, I worked on VR in college with some of the top professors in the day... . Lag from turning your head to having the view change, even as low as 20ms is enough to make people sick.
Do not look at laser with remaining good eye.