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Michael Abrash Joins Oculus, Calls Facebook 'Final Piece of the Puzzle'
trawg writes: "Programming legend Michael Abrash has announced that he has joined the Oculus team to work on the Rift VR headset as Chief Scientist, and will be once again working with John Carmack to bring VR to life. His post covers a lot of ground, including the history of his quest for VR, and ends with his explanation of why he thinks the Facebook acquisition is ultimately a good thing — they have the engineering, resources and long-term commitment 'to solve the hard problems of VR.'"
Abrash has long maintained a blog about VR tech — it's worth reading if the subject matter interests you.
Programming legend Michael Abrash...
Who?
An enigma, wrapped in a riddle, shrouded in bacon and cheese
Keep that in mind. Facebook is not a company of technological excellence (Apple) or software excellence (Google), but simply got lucky for being the social site that everyone went to.
You can finally see the picture. It's a giant middle finger. Flipping you off. Forever.
You can have all the engineering genius in the world, but when you have famous programmers abandoning the platform because of it's association with Facebook, what's the point?
If a tree falls in a forest with nobody to hear it...
"It does not do to leave a live dragon out of your calculations, if you live near him." - Tolkien
Virtual 3D wall with ads that fly into your face?
Virtual 3D panorama of your friends' latest photographs of their cats?
To me VR is as important to Facebook as a spoiler to a Trabant.
The things I do for a large pile of cash...
And I call Facebook the final straw.
Get free satoshi (Bitcoin) and Dogecoins
Not. VR is definitely cool for games and art, but in many other cases it is overrated. Data analysis, science, or medicine will not really benefit from it in the form of VR headsets.
This is different with augmented reality. This is can really be helpful for many people.
This man thinks like he has a fixed amount of registers. This is a good thing for interfacing software and hardware.
Too bad my original desire for their combo, to develop tools to restore eyesight, is now moot.
Don't complain about syntax, grammar, or spelling. There is no.hell like input on android.
Does anyone know what's so special about Oculus? Do they have some intellectual property that will make them money, or are they just improving on 30 year old ideas?
It seems to me that all we're waiting for are component prices(high res, compact LCDs and accurate, fast sensors) to drop. Sure, there will be some software work, but we already have stereoscopic support in game engines and now 3d media content.
Sure, there will be a lot of work crafting new interfaces and presentation schemes, but that's all software and design, not hardware.
http://www.masturbateforpeace.com/
But of course, they won't be able to get funded through kickstarter now. That well has been poisoned for this sort of project, at least.
But maybe this will be what convinces an investor to get on board there. And then hopefully that won't become as contaminated as this. And it's what's really wanted, a good augmented reality display. I don't just want to replace life, I want to augment it :p
"You're right," Fisheye says. "I should have set it on 'whip' or 'chop.'"
Facebook now has VR googles, so we can go visit the inter webs!
I am Slashdot. Are you Slashdot as well?
I'm a C/C++/VB.NET/PHP programmer and I can safely say that a good programmer can be a good programmer in PHP, it just takes more effort from the programmer to be discplined about good programming practices. And I totally agree that disrepecting a company or individual for the language their product is developed in is ill informed and shows a lack of experience and understanding of the person forming that opinion.
One of the biggest flaws in PHP is being totally typeless and undeclared - which is a flaw that facebook themselves are attempting to remedy. I haven't actually looked into their proposed solutions, but I do at least respect their development team a bit for trying to give back to the community - even if I totally hate what they otherwise stand for as a company.
Heck, at one point, I would of said it's impossible to make a real game in Java (which I don't know) - but look at minecraft's success. It still may not of been the best choice, but it's obviously possible.
To be fair, aren't C++ and Java notorious for doing a bad job of picking up garbage, so maybe you don't know garbage when you see it. :)
After the FB/Oculus news, I looked into alternatives and found about this InfinitEye project from France that claims to do 210 degree of horizontal FOV, fully covering the human peripheral vision (while the Rift only does only 90 degrees). I'd pay attention to this one now.
Circumcision is child abuse.
It's sounding a lot like this acquisition really has a lot less to do with Facebook itself, than just to do with Facebook's money. FB is in a business that can only be monetized so much. It's also a nook where many predecessors have suddenly gone from most-popular-site-eva to a discarded remnant. Geocities, Myspace, etc were also very popular in their day but inevitably doomed.
If Microsoft could start a successful game console, perhaps FB can move into the VR market. I see disastrous things if they try to mix their core business with Occulous, and frankly the privacy implications scare me enough that I'll be keeping my distance for now, but I've still got a small grain of hope that they're really just looking to buy into emerging markets to pad the inevitable decline of their primary LOB.
From the article, Abash has been around for 57 years ?
Oculus HR obviously didn't get the memo yet to ignore guys over 30.
Thanks to people like you, the earth's quota of despair can be fulfilled by a few miserable people and the rest can live their lives out in happiness.
Don't complain about syntax, grammar, or spelling. There is no.hell like input on android.
asdsadasda dfdfdfs ddsfsd
"This is the year that virtual reality becomes mainstream" [1-25]
[1] Some guy, (1964.)
[2] Some guy, (1974.)
[3] Some guy, (1979.)
[4] Some guy, (1981.)
[5] Some guy, (1982.)
[6] Some guy, (1983.)
[7] Some guy, (1984.)
[8] Some guy, (1986.)
[9] Some guy, (1989.)
[10] Some guy, (1994.)
[11] Some guy, (1995.)
[12] Some guy, (1996.)
[13] Some guy, (1997.)
[14] Some guy, (1999.)
[15] Some guy, (2000.)
[16] Some guy, (2002.)
[17] Some guy, (2003.)
[18] Some guy, (2006.)
[19] Some guy, (2007.)
[20] Some guy, (2009.)
[21] Some guy, (2010.)
[22] Some guy, (2011.)
[23] Some guy, (2012.)
[24] Some guy, (2013.)
[25] Some guy at Facebook, (2014.)
C++ doesn't have any garbage collection. There is an offshoot of C++ used by MS that has managed-code features, but that's not standard C++ (and they're probably not bothering with it much these days in their push to C#).
The trouble with VR is that it's hard to do anything in there except move and shoot. Manipulation sucks without force feedback. When VR was first developed, there was a lot of interest in it for CAD. But it didn't help.
Trying to assemble parts in VR is no better than doing it with a mouse and screen. Legos might work. VR Minecraft is quite possible, because things snap into place in easily implemented ways. Real world parts don't fit together as simply.
(Although, thinking about this, it might be possible. You'd need a good game physics engine with very good support for actual geometry. Not just bounding boxes, but good enough to handle bolt-in-hole placement. This is a solved problem in collision detection (I used to work on that), but most games don't bother. Then you'd need to assist the user with something like the "Assemble" feature in Autodesk Inventor. But it would need to be more physical and less symbolic than the way Inventor does it, where assembly means aligning two facing features. Inventor does it that way because you may want to align the features first, then put a hole and bolt through both, then project the hole back onto the original parts so you know where to drill the hole in each part. This is what you need for mechanical design, but not for assembling existing parts.)
Getting the old band back together.
Come on Zuckerburg, get Romero on board! Because Facebook is DEFINITELY going to make you their bitch.
He's ill at ease with being the product Facebook sells to its customers, and skeptical of Facebook's ability to treat its product (its users' eyeballs) like paying customers. Seems reasonable to me. I want to know exactly what category I fall into when I deal with a company. If I'm the product, fine, I have one set of expectations. If I'm the customer, fine, I have a different set. I don't know what to make of attempting to blend those, and I don't blame anyone for being apprehensive about how that might turn out. Probably not fair to put that on par with "despair" at all, much less "the earth's quota of despair." It's a pretty small proportion of the earth's deflated enthusiasm.
The real trouble with this is that they're envisioning a Snow Crash-like metaverse, and I'm envisioning Second Life with Facebook friends and goggles. The flying cocks are going to look amazing this time.
not that rare if you kn ow wtf you are doing
Does anyone know what's so special about Oculus?
Somewhat like bitcoin it has hit a segment of the geek population that thinks it's something especially cool and they've been selling it at a price point that hard core gamers can afford to give it a spin.
Do they have some intellectual property that will make them money, or are they just improving on 30 year old ideas
The later. Occulus is nifty but it's evolutionary improvement on technology that has existed for a long time. There still appears to be no killer use case for their product outside of a small segment of gamers. Facebook paying $2 billion for this company is an absurd overpayment. I seriously cannot figure out a reasonable scenario by which Facebook will recover that much money on this technology.
or, most of the people that are despairing are the ones smart enough to see the writing on the wall, while the happy people let their ignorance run everything right off the cliff.
sega cd?
to be honest, C++ (not Java) is impressive for not having garbage that needs picking up, so no... he probably doesn't know it :-)
But then, he does Java, so I imagine he knows exactly what garbage is.
Still happy!
Don't complain about syntax, grammar, or spelling. There is no.hell like input on android.
...is how to use it without looking like a complete tool.
Abrash:
He must have a lot of faith in the patience of Facebook's investors and shareholders.
I haven't paid much attention to Oculus, until very recently. I can side with Oculus HQ talking up the future of VR, to shaft the douchebag Mark Zuckerberg, but I'm not buying the whole VR for social bit. Several years ago, Second Life was getting the hype for a virtual world. It did not gather steam. There are MMORPGs, like Everquest, and World of Warcraft.
In the last year, there has been serious talk about the end of Moore's Law. Nvidia complained to TSMC a couple of years ago about transistor prices. There are limits to what 193 nm immersion lithography with multipatterning can do, probably 14nm or 10nm. Intel is going to start selling 14 nm chips later this year. Smaller transistors, are not becoming cheaper. They are not getting faster, but power consumption continues to decline. 450 mm wafer, EUV can go a bit further. It has to stop somewhere, and that somewhere is not far away. 10 nm? 5 nm? 1 nm?
The big question is, how many CUDA cores will it take to render a good enough metaverse, and how much will they cost? I think it will be more than the average person is willing to pay.
On the other hand, video games will become more fun, and that is innovation enough for me.
memory management in C++ is designed to require neither garbage collection nor remembering to stick free(); everywhere. have you ever heard the term "smart pointer"? if anything, C++ is notorious for having fewer memory management problems than just about anything else.
Guy is one of, if not the, best at assembly optimization, particularly as it pertains to videogames. So if what you want is something that is fast, stable, and highly optimized, well he's one of the best around.
It is highly unlikely Doom would have ever been able to exist at the time it did, were it not for his expertise in optimizations.
Facebook is written in php...Keep that in mind. Facebook is not a company of technological excellence
If you look below the annoying surface of the Facebook page, you'll find a very different story. Facebook actually HAS been a company of technical excellence.
On PHP in particular, most technical people look down on PHP... but instead of doing that, Facebook figured out how to fix some of what was broken about PHP so they could still use the good aspects of it.
That's not a company that does not have some technical chops.
"There is more worth loving than we have strength to love." - Brian Jay Stanley
I'm guessing that the puzzle he just solved was how to finance his retirement account.
If Slashdot were chemistry it would look like this:Cadaverine
He's close. It's actually the final piece of go fuck yourself because now NOBODY is going to buy it.
There's a difference between CS and SE. Sounds like you went to learn how to be an engineer. Doesn't mean my degree is any less valid..
On top of it, he's a pretty insightful game designer as well. I worked with him at Microsoft years back and he taught me an amazing amount about practical game design theory.
Wow, never heard of that before. It seems that .NET Framework 1.0 did indeed include a managed C++ language with garbage collection.
...then it was a fucking shitty puzzle we should just burn.
I remember being blown away by this game... basically a Donkey Kong style game but on the original IBM PC hardware. I read the review in PC Magazine and asked for it for my 14th birthday... I couldn't believe that things like swinging and jumping from swinging ropes while 4 other AI sprites chased me around was even possible on that original PC.
He even showed off a little by full screen scrolling in between levels.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/B...
C++ doesn't have any garbage collection. There is an offshoot of C++ used by MS that has managed-code features, but that's not standard C++ (and they're probably not bothering with it much these days in their push to C#).
C++ certainly have garbage collection: auto_ptr, shared_ptr etc. are clearly using garbage collection to function. Most C and C++ code use reference counting in some way or another and that is also garbage collection.
memory management in C++ is designed to require neither garbage collection nor remembering to stick free(); everywhere. have you ever heard the term "smart pointer"? if anything, C++ is notorious for having fewer memory management problems than just about anything else.
And that is a kind of garbage collection...
I understand that its impossible for facebook to fart without it making slashdot, and now that will extend to oculus.
And i think they main thing everyone who's saying "This facebook crap is a good thing" is failing to mention, its a good thing for the finances of the stock holders perhaps, the lead engineers who now have a coushy job in a larger more stable organization. good for advertisers. but good for gamers, no its not good for gamers, even if they do continue to develop it, its tainted now
Not enough though. One can never be courted by too many billionaire CEOs.
The dangers of knowledge trigger emotional distress in human beings.
For people who want to give the Graphics Programming Black Book a read, you can do so here. Chapters 64 to 70 are relevant to his work on Quake with Carmack.
And the ones who want to roll their own version from the eBook sources can go here!
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