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Michael Abrash Joins Oculus, Calls Facebook 'Final Piece of the Puzzle'

Posted by Soulskill on from the go-big-or-go-home dept.

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.

24 of 232 comments (clear)

  1. Facebook is written in php by Karganeth · · Score: 5, Insightful

    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.

    1. Re:Facebook is written in php by istartedi · · Score: 4, Insightful

      I don't think he's going to be dicking around in their web site code. It could be written in Brainfuck for all he cares. What matters is they have MONEY which he can use to fund efforts at using better technology to write it. Somewhere, somebody has some social site written in the cleanest, most beautiful, maintainable, optimized code that ever existed but... they don't have MONEY. Such is the way of the world. Keeping up with the Kardashians (which is all FaceBook really is) rakes it in. By comparison, things of quality might make *some* MONEY but not enough to fund blue sky projects like VR. At least he's not building rockets for the nazis. Things are much better these days for technical people who need a sugar daddy.

      --
      For all intensive purposes, "whom" is no longer a word. That begs the question, "who cares"?
    2. Re:Facebook is written in php by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 5, Interesting

      Actually, FB has a lot of technological excellence... it isn't seen:

      1: They have done more for biometric security and automated facial recognition than virtually any other company out there.

      2: They have a very well made system for hunting down people who are actual people versus dummy/sock puppet accounts that get squashed.

      3: They are excellent at geolocation.

      4: They created the "commodity hardware, have the backend application do all the redundancy" where the fault tolerance is in the top of the stack, as opposed to the hardware like the IBM mainframes. This allows for the absolute cheapest machines possible, and if they die, things continue on. Even entire data centers can drop off the face of the earth.

      5: They have the best behavioral reporting and profiling tech out there. Want to check if people 18-25 are interested in your new widget? Easily done by a FB trial balloon.

      6: FB advertising is one of the few channels that work. People turn off their TV, but the FB ads will still come to them no matter what. I've used it to propagate info for a non-profit gathering... and attendance doubled.

      7: FB is one of the few enterprises that can actually get btrfs from an early beta state to a finished product that can handle production data. Without Facebook, btrfs would probably spend another five years being semi-ignored.

      8: FB is one of the few Internet based companies, who, a year after IPO, has stock prices higher than they were when hitting the market and still solid.

      9: FB has very tight security. You never see a note about Facebook being hacked, and in security, no news is good news.

      10: FB is platform agnostic.

      So, even though people bag FB, it is one of the smartest-run businesses on the face of the planet.

    3. Re:Facebook is written in php by Ralph+Wiggam · · Score: 4, Funny

      Please ignore those facts and take your seat on the Facebook Hate Train.

    4. Re:Facebook is written in php by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 4, Insightful

      And one more thing. The basic functions of the site wouldn't be hard to create and run for a 100 people. But do that for a million and things get different. Do it for 1.2 billion and things get fucking weird. They MUST have some serious shit going on to operate at that scale. Yeah, they've got tons of market analysts and designer-types, but somewhere they've got some Ph.D. computer science guys that are making the core of the thing run, inventing technology that doesn't exist anywhere else because this kind of scale just isn't normally done.

  2. Now that the puzzle is complete... by i+kan+reed · · Score: 4, Insightful

    You can finally see the picture. It's a giant middle finger. Flipping you off. Forever.

  3. Re:Legendary... by jones_supa · · Score: 5, Informative

    He was a developer in Quake and has released Michael Abrash's Graphics Programming Black Book.

  4. He calls Facebook the final piece of the puzzle by ArcadeMan · · Score: 3, Funny

    And I call Facebook the final straw.

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  5. Re:Legendary... by OnceWas · · Score: 5, Informative

    "Michael Abrash is a game programmer and technical writer specializing in optimization and 80x86 assembly language, game programming, a reputation cemented by his 1990 book Zen of Assembly Language Volume 1: Knowledge. Related issues were covered in his later book Zen of Graphics Programming. [...] After working at Microsoft on graphics and assembly code for Windows NT 3.1, he returned to the game industry in the mid-1990s to work on Quake for id Software. "

    http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/M...

    --
    Laugh while you can, monkey-boy.
  6. Re:Legendary... by Animats · · Score: 5, Informative

    He's well known if you're into the low-level machinery of game graphics.

  7. Re:Legendary... by sconeu · · Score: 5, Insightful

    Turn in your geek card.

    In addition to what other people have already said, his columns on graphics in the old dead-tree version of DDJ were a must-read.

    --
    General Relativity: Space-time tells matter where to go; Matter tells space-time what shape to be.
  8. Re:Legendary... by Barlo_Mung_42 · · Score: 4, Informative

    Also responsible for much of the graphics in NT.

  9. What about InfinitEye? by Stormwatch · · Score: 3, Informative

    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.
  10. Re:Legendary... by elysiuan · · Score: 5, Insightful

    Would never have been an error in the past sadly.

  11. Re:Legendary... by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 3, Insightful

    You might be surprised, but the scope of "graphics programming" is very limited when compared to the entirerty of the software industry.

    Making optimizations on a project and putting out a book of tricks hardly qualifies a person to be a software legend. Especially when those tricks are derived from commonly used techniques in much of the embedded system / signal processing development world where resources are extremely limited.

    Doesn't mean he's not experienced/good at what he does, but hardly qualifies to be put on the pedastal you seem to be putting him on.

    Brian Kernighan and Dennis Ritchie on the other hand...

  12. Because Oculus HR didn't get the memo yet by ggraham412 · · Score: 3, Insightful

    From the article, Abash has been around for 57 years ?

    Oculus HR obviously didn't get the memo yet to ignore guys over 30.

    1. Re:Because Oculus HR didn't get the memo yet by spire3661 · · Score: 3, Insightful

      There is no one under 30 that can do what Abrash does.

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      Good-bye
  13. Re: Legendary... by the_humeister · · Score: 3, Interesting

    That was a good book. I remember getting it at Barnes and Noble back in 1996. Back then AP computer science was taught in Pascal. But his book was in C so I couldn't use any of the code samples. But it was pretty easy to convert to Pascal. Made a rudimentary asteroids game in 320x240 VGA (with page flipping! Although I felt his way of loading VGA latches and then writing was too complicated so I just drew to a memory buffer and copied to alternating video pages with vsync) with prerendered graphics. It was absolutely awesome. And then I accidentally deleted my hard driveâ¦

  14. Re:Legendary... by spire3661 · · Score: 4, Interesting

    Abrash worked at Intel for years on Larrabee, hes not just a video game engineer. Gabe Newell courted him for YEARS to get him away from Intel. How many billionaire CEOs have courted you personally?

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    Good-bye
  15. "This is the year..." by Snufu · · Score: 3, Funny

    "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.)

  16. Re:Legendary... by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 3, Insightful

    > Except I'm not a fucking programmer, and especially not a game programmer.
    Submitted story starts with: Programming legend Michael Abrash...

    It's great that you're not a programmer and all, but then why would you come into a story about programmer and act all incensed that YOU didn't know who he was? Did you miss the very first word in the description: 'Programming' ? Did you think that we would NOT be discussing about a very legendary person in the programming world?

    If you wanted an explanation, you could have asked for one. Instead you asked only, "Who?" Tell me, do you have problems detecting sarcasm? This is an actual disorder, and perhaps it would help you to know simply asking 'Who' implies to most normal people that you think Abrash is not worthy of knowing. Especially to programmers, which I may remind you is the first word of the submission.

  17. Re:Legendary... by metlin · · Score: 4, Informative

    You must be kidding me.

    When I was in high school, I discovered Abrash's Zen of Graphics Programming, filled with all kinds of gems. And then, Quake came out and there was his Graphics Programming Black Book.

    Between x86 optimization, BSP trees, and assorted C/C++ tricks, Abrash's books were bibles at a time when graphics programming was just taking off.

    I remember writing my own ray-tracer and 3d engine based on what I learned in his books.

    Then there was his book on Zen of Code Optimization, which was amazing and filled with all kinds of computational optimization techniques for a time when not using a memory register effectively meant your render would stop halfway.

    Michael Abrash and John Carmack were legends -- their techniques in optimizing rendering engines and their efforts in making graphics programming accessible to wider audiences were instrumental in enabling high end graphics. In fact, makers of graphics cards were known to design features based on optimization techniques that were used in Quake and other rendering engines.

    And there was also something called "demo scene", where people built amazing programming snippets of graphics, media, and art. Between that and Abrash and Carmack's work, graphics got to where we are today.

    So, yeah. Your question shows an unfortunate level of ignorance on the origins of the graphics programming industry.

  18. Re:Legendary... by Rockoon · · Score: 4, Informative

    Get over yourself... "turn in your geek card" indeed...

    No. Seriously. Turn in your geek card.

    A geek would be interested even if they werent interested in graphics programming. Thats why Abrash was a writer for Dr Dobbs Programmers Technical Journal, not Graphics Weekly.

    I have no interest in writing an operating system, yet Dr Dobbs also covered the porting of BSD to the 386 architecture culminating in 386BSD which I was an avid follower of.

    You sir, are a technology brat, not a geek.

    --
    "His name was James Damore."
  19. Depends on what the puzzle was by paiute · · Score: 3, Funny

    I'm guessing that the puzzle he just solved was how to finance his retirement account.

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