I'm not sure if that really counts as prior art, but another Lab(sorry Japanese only, but with pictures) from the university I graduated from already had a system that displayed both 2D and 3D sprites of real players on soccer field in real time on a interactive 3D soccer field with tons of real time information about them. They also had tons of similar systems not only for soccer and sports but also classrooms, training facilities, theaters etc. And that was like, 2005, back when I was in my first semester of the Bachelor course.
I guess using a profile thumbnail instead of a 3D model is innovation.
I'm not really understanding the hate for this feature. From what I've heard this feature like a new dialog optimized for 3D printing. Just like when you press Control+P on almost any text app and the print dialog pops up with basic, de-facto standard options as well as a more advance menu based on the drivers of each printer. But instead of printing a 2D document it prints a 3D object. If this is the case then why all the hate?
At work, whenever I what to print anything, I have to save my work as a STL file in SolidWorks or Blender. Then I have to open another app(Catalyst EX for Stratsys Dimension printers for example) that connects to the 3D Printer embedded computer on the LAN, load the model there and then I can print. This system works, even has some advantages over the driver/dialog/OS integrated model, but it's far from ideal. Just being able to press Control+3 or whatever and directly print my stuff sounds great. I hope 3d printer manufactures offer both options just like hi-end office printer manufactures do(web server interface or OS drivers). As a hardware medical/system engineer I hope microsoft(and Linux) also add similar support for the not so popular CNC mills as well, including PCB mills(gerber data compatibility).
I think the technology is interesting but what is the purpose of a VTOL rocket? VTOL aircraft make sense because you can use them for rescue and military operations were a track may not be available. But rockets are just for sending payloads in to orbit. For reusable space craft, unless I see numbers proving me wrong, I think vehicles that use "passive" methods to come back (gliding) like the space shuttle or the Virgin Galactic prototypes seem a lot more economical(dollars/payload weight/launch). Even if the objective is to use VTOL craft for landing on another planet/asteroid/moon and then use the same craft to come back you still need fuel and infrastructure.
Because, at least for me, it's hard to imagine a use, it's hard to get funding as well. I guess the reason SpaceX is spending time and money on these rockets is not because they are actively interested in VTOL vehicles either, but just because they want to benchmark the engines and sensors, so that they can use some of this tech on more useful products.
As a Russian who lives in Japan this really is pissing me off. If they aren't counting Imperial Russia Era then they shouldn't count Imperial Japan Era either. Democratic Constitutional Monarchy Japan is only about 63~64 years old.
Yeah. The deadly metal 3d printer thing is more like a joke than any real danger. Not only our company is installing in a well ventilated area but we also have a sensor that goes off on the entire building in case the O2 concentration goes bellow 18.5%(which is still safe). However according to the experts installing the printer, if by any chance Murphy's Law decide to work and you have simultaneously, ventilation power failure, sensor failure and uncontrolled Argon leakage and the O2 concentration goes bellow 16% you're as good as dead, because once you breathe the Argon in it seems you can't breathe it out. The chances of this happening are lower than me winning the lottery, but we all know printers attack when we expect the least.
As for the printer model, it's a EOSINT M (for metal, don't remember the exactly model number, but I have the feeling it's the same one you have. According to the sales company there are only two other places here in Japan that have this printer) and we are also getting the EOSINT FORMIGA (for polymer, also uses a CO2 laser but doesn't need Argon, BTW, based on the sample models they gave us this is by far the BEST plastic 3d printer I've seen in my life)
It's not just cheap 3D printers. My workplace has whole collection of professional 3D printers at our disposal: multiple Dimension ABS printer models, an Eden Acrylic printer(hate this one in particular), and a couple of Vantage poly-carbonate printers and we're getting ourselves ready for a million dollars DMLS metal 3D printer. The plastic ones have a malfunction at least once every 4~6 months. The metal one can literally kill you if the Argon gas, used to avoid metal oxidation at high laser temperatures, leaks(death by asphyxiation). 3D printers are just another type of printers after all. Anyone would be just fooling themselves if they think that Stratasys products are more human friendly than the usual HP/Xerox/Cannon/Brother products.
Now back on the original topic. I think the technology is ready for consumer level. But being a consumer product doesn't necessarily make it a mainstream product. 3D printing is useful for people that know how to intelligently use it and already have a specific set of objectives in mind. The average Joe has no business with 3d printing. Buying a 3d printer for an occasional toy/statue that you casually downloaded from the internet is just not worth it. 2D printers succeeded in the mainstream market because everybody NEEDS to print school reports, tax reports, CVs, invitations, tickets, pamphlets, etc.
On top of that 3D printing was(and still is) just immensely overhyped by the internet. Blogs/News websites/Comments and people who never even used a 3D printer before just treated the tech as if it was the ultimate home appliance: "buy a 3D printer and print everything else you need". For example another currently overhyped tech field that will suffer the same "disappointing" effect is VR: occulus/omni/hydra VR paraphernalia is useful for some applications but are far from the "holy grail" of gaming/computing for dozens of reasons. Eventually I believe all these techs will become essential parts of daily life but there are still many obstacles to overcome, from product features and services to user mentality and place in the society.
Hopefully these guys are the next target. I LOVE their sashimi. Easily my favorite food ever. Eat at least once every week. Too bad according to some projections, they are supposed to go extinct in the next 10 years. Hopefully this tech also helps with the whaling problem as well. I don't like whale meat(and even living in Japan I'm yet to meet a single person who eats whale other than public school lunch) but for some reason Japan loves to kill them.
1) Software can't be patented argument is a lazy and misleading argument. I can describe any piece of hardware(electronics, mechanisms, chemical formulas, etc) as a set of numbers and formulas. Either we get rid of all patents or we make the system harder/more intelligent(no more slide to unlock crap). I don't care which we do as long it makes the lives of us engineers easier. But using misleading arguments do NOT help our cause.
2) Processor architecture is much more than the instruction set. The way interrupts are triggered, the way clock is distributed, the way the pipeline works, how many instructions per clock it can do, along many other factors that change how the actual instructions are arranged. So even if a certain instruction happens to have the same binary for different architectures, depending on the state the processor is it may not work because the internal implementation is different.
3) Processor architectures(and any chip) by themselves are not patented but instead copyrighted(the circuit pattern is basically a set of images). The circuit blocks that compose these chips and architectures may or may not be patented.
Unfortunately that is not how things work. Unless Sony decide to open-source, or at least, release the binary for someone to reverse engineer them, having the PS4 using BSD+AMD combo will have no impact on the open development scene at all. It's going contribute to the BSD driver library as much as OSX, which is also based of BSD, did, i.e. nothing.
Either that or someone jailbreaks the PS4, dumps all it's system files and starts reversing.
Another nice feature would be protecting only patents actually used in products made by the inventor or its partners, in order to take out those so called patent trolls that don't produce anything. If in the future the inventor actually decides to use the patent in an actual product and there is someone already using it there could be some sort of predetermined fee. Obviously I'm oversimplifying the huge problem, but something must be done about those parasites.
Sony is a group with hundreds of companies and hundreds of thousands of employees. In terms of structure/complexity they are bigger than Apple, MS and Nintendo together. Sony has lot of good and lot bad mixed together. To judge such cluster**** based on a handful of experiences(regardless of being bad or good) is just impossible. Also it's important to notice that Sony is under a new direction(Kaz Hirai, since 2012) and being completely restructured(One Sony plan). Judging the new administration based on the older is just unfair. Who knows Kaz may help Sony like Jobs helped Apple in the 90s.
The PS4 wasn't even developed in Japan or by a Japanese, hell it will even be released earlier in the US and Europe.
While I agree with most of what you said I'm pretty sure this is false, at least for most part. During E3 they introduced the Japanese guy who designed the PS4 case. Also there is an interview with a Gearbox programmer(forgot his name) he says that they needed 8GB(instead of 4GB) or the PS4 would be dead. So they sent a guy to Japan headquarters in order to get a new devkit. Finally, the new controller was also designed by a Japanese team (there is an Engadget article about it with some AR demos). I don't think the PS4 was entirelly developed in Japan, but most of it's main features came from there. I have no idea about the exact date the PS4 will be released, but it makes sense releasing it first in the West because the holiday season. The Japanese release will follow in a few weeks max(as it's still supposed to come this year) so this fact is not really relevant.
I apologize for the cursing. Nothing personal, sorry. Optical media may suck for some mainstream applications, 480p movies from retail stores being one of them. But the way you wrote your post made me believe the only reason disks are good for movies. Also not all optical disks are created equal. Blu-ray disks are considerably more scratch resistant than CDs and DVDs. Even between DVDs themselves, depending on the materials and burning methods you can have different reliability.
Thanks bro, but I think you should also educated yourself about something called CONTEXT. I know very well that tapes are pretty good media for long term storage and back up for today demands. But compared to a optical disk capable of 1PB storage, they'll lose in pretty much all aspects.
Nice job isolating a single sentence out of my entire post just bring up completely offtopic information just to make a fool of yourself. Congratulations.
Now that they got the procedure I hope they do that with Einstein's brain and, after that, let it rest in peace with the rest of the body. That is assuming that the cellular structure is still intact after half a century inside a jar. Then delete IBM watson and instead install the observed model along side an appropriate bio-physic-chemical engine on the hardware and we can finally enjoy the new age of singularity and no need to think anymore.
How the fuck this comment is tagged Insightful? This is probably one of the biggest displays of ignorance I've seen in a long time. Do you even know how large data centers perform back ups. Using ****ing magnetic tapes(5TB by Fujitu being the biggest I've heard of). Tapes are big, slow as hell and one of the unreliable. A CD sized disk capable of 1PB is a god send. Life is much more than buying shitty DVDs at Costco. And that is only one of the obvious applications for this tech that comes to my mind.
I tried Sony's headset last year and almost forked over $800 for it. Same resolution as the current OR headsets.
Not same. The HMZ has two 720p displays. The current OR DK has one divided in half. Even their newest 1080p prototype, which is a 1080p display divided in half, has a smaller resolution than the HMZ if you count out the unused border pixels. Saying that the new OR is a Full HD device is like saying the 3DS resolution is 240x800.
Anyway the HMZ and OR are two very different products. They both fall under the head mount display category, but the OR is optimized for VR while the HMZ is optimized for movies/TV and "standard" non-immersive gaming.
. But what do we have on the consumer market that can drive 4k displays? Nothin'.
Eyeinfinity capable cards have been able to drive resolutions way beyond 4k using multiple monitors during real time gaming. VR headsets are very niche. People that buy these toys have a beast of a PC already. 4k is nothing. What we need are the actual displays. As for the Mac Pro part of your comment, the Mac Pro is advertising better/faster 4k video and image editing. 4k video output has been available for ages. On top of that the new Mac Pro is still a horrible gaming machine, as it uses workstation/server class components.
They probably received. Just didn't accept. But the chances they didn't get offers is pretty big as well and for a number of reasons. The tech is relatively "new". The concept/design is just a rehash of VR from the 90's but with modern electronic components, but because it's been so far nonexistent in the consumer market it can be considered a novelty. And because of that nobody really knows how well it will do in the market. Here is a small list of uncertainties. There are much more than that but that is what I can take of the top of my head:
-While OR seems to be popular in the internet gaming microcosm, how is the average gamer is going to react to it? Is VR the next "motion controller"? Genuinely useful and interesting, sometimes over-hyped by the media but in the eventually becoming "boring" due to bad/repetitive execution or lack of innovative content?
-Is the business model sustainable? $300(or less) for a very niche device in a company that seems to be under a bubble effect doesn't look very good in the long term. The OR is too expensive for the average Joe but to cheap to print money on the niche market.
-OculusVR has no IP at all(other than a proprietary API and the brand). I could create a competing product prototype today using just scraps. If I can, sony/nintendo/etc can easily do and for much cheaper so there is no reason to pay millions for something you could build it yourself for a few hundred thousands. And if they do, OculusVR is dead as a company. Personally I actually want a competitor to appear soon(I support them but I'm not by any means a fan), I just hope is not an electronics Juggernaut that will destroy the "indie" competition.(although after this E3, I bet my ass sony will be showing off a VR solution(not the HMZ personal display) for the PS4 and maybe even Vita by the next E3.)
-It's a gaming device. An accessory. The gaming industry is worth tens of billions, but almost all this money is on the software side of the industry. Because I see those major consoles sometimes struggling to break even, I think it's safe to say that the OR challenge has just begun and they might actually have some really dark times in the future.
-Is immersion really the holy grail of gaming? Most of the best selling games are not even first person games. Not sure if I should have made a bullet point about it, but it reinforces the idea of niche content.
I applaud the initiative (I even bought a dev kit that hasn't arrived yet) but it's a high risk low return business.
It's been a year since the kickstarter funding and the company formation. They got 2.5M from kickstarter and I suppose another 2.5~3.5 as a personal investment from the current CEO. So they basically had around 6M in the bank at start.
Then they hired a lot of people. I think they have 20 employees in total if my sources are correct. Assuming a average of 100k/person including bonuses/insurance/etc that is at least 2M/year in expenses.
Then there is renting, utilities and taxes. That is another 500k/year at least.
And finally there is the actual development/deployment of the dev kit and promotion(E3 booths, CES, etc) as well as R&D infrastructure build up so there goes most of the rest of the money.
Without this VC investment, I feared they'd sell off and/or close doors in a question of months. I just hope the VCs don't let their "expertise" go out of control.
Please don't trust opinions you read on the internet. Most people who tried it were either journalists(which won't complain about it as it's a "hot" item and they don't want to displease the "hivemind" and lose readers), some game devs(mostly for a similar reason) and fanboys. Plus there is no competition so there is nothing to direct compare it against. The best I can come up with is the HMZ which is designed as a personal display(basically a big 3DTV only you can see) for movies and games, not a VR device. Don't get me wrong, it's a great device. Just overhyped as hell.
This pisses me off, as a former Sony victim I want that company to die horribly. Come on, Sony, follow Microsoft's lead and let Nintendo have the game business!
This is nothing but a display of ignorance. Sony did lot's of bad things in the past indeed, but they're are under the new leadership(Kaz Hirai) since Q1 last year and since them they've been doing quite a lot great things. Open source android projects, semi-open game platforms, restructure of the company and product lines and removal of incompetent staff just to name a few. To demonize the whole company because the poor choices of a few is just not fair.
By the way, your beloved Nintendo has a fair share of black history as well. This whole closed console DRM plagued business is their ****ing invention, let alone their love for proprietary formats.
Given the amount of unsecured network cameras I can easily find with a simple google search, this idea will be a all I can eat buffet. I hope this product is popular between hot chicks.
Slashdot Mirror
I'm not sure if that really counts as prior art, but another Lab(sorry Japanese only, but with pictures) from the university I graduated from already had a system that displayed both 2D and 3D sprites of real players on soccer field in real time on a interactive 3D soccer field with tons of real time information about them. They also had tons of similar systems not only for soccer and sports but also classrooms, training facilities, theaters etc. And that was like, 2005, back when I was in my first semester of the Bachelor course.
I guess using a profile thumbnail instead of a 3D model is innovation.
I'm not really understanding the hate for this feature. From what I've heard this feature like a new dialog optimized for 3D printing. Just like when you press Control+P on almost any text app and the print dialog pops up with basic, de-facto standard options as well as a more advance menu based on the drivers of each printer. But instead of printing a 2D document it prints a 3D object. If this is the case then why all the hate?
At work, whenever I what to print anything, I have to save my work as a STL file in SolidWorks or Blender. Then I have to open another app(Catalyst EX for Stratsys Dimension printers for example) that connects to the 3D Printer embedded computer on the LAN, load the model there and then I can print. This system works, even has some advantages over the driver/dialog/OS integrated model, but it's far from ideal. Just being able to press Control+3 or whatever and directly print my stuff sounds great. I hope 3d printer manufactures offer both options just like hi-end office printer manufactures do(web server interface or OS drivers). As a hardware medical/system engineer I hope microsoft(and Linux) also add similar support for the not so popular CNC mills as well, including PCB mills(gerber data compatibility).
I think the technology is interesting but what is the purpose of a VTOL rocket? VTOL aircraft make sense because you can use them for rescue and military operations were a track may not be available. But rockets are just for sending payloads in to orbit. For reusable space craft, unless I see numbers proving me wrong, I think vehicles that use "passive" methods to come back (gliding) like the space shuttle or the Virgin Galactic prototypes seem a lot more economical(dollars/payload weight/launch). Even if the objective is to use VTOL craft for landing on another planet/asteroid/moon and then use the same craft to come back you still need fuel and infrastructure.
Because, at least for me, it's hard to imagine a use, it's hard to get funding as well. I guess the reason SpaceX is spending time and money on these rockets is not because they are actively interested in VTOL vehicles either, but just because they want to benchmark the engines and sensors, so that they can use some of this tech on more useful products.
As a Russian who lives in Japan this really is pissing me off. If they aren't counting Imperial Russia Era then they shouldn't count Imperial Japan Era either. Democratic Constitutional Monarchy Japan is only about 63~64 years old.
Yeah. The deadly metal 3d printer thing is more like a joke than any real danger. Not only our company is installing in a well ventilated area but we also have a sensor that goes off on the entire building in case the O2 concentration goes bellow 18.5%(which is still safe). However according to the experts installing the printer, if by any chance Murphy's Law decide to work and you have simultaneously, ventilation power failure, sensor failure and uncontrolled Argon leakage and the O2 concentration goes bellow 16% you're as good as dead, because once you breathe the Argon in it seems you can't breathe it out. The chances of this happening are lower than me winning the lottery, but we all know printers attack when we expect the least.
As for the printer model, it's a EOSINT M (for metal, don't remember the exactly model number, but I have the feeling it's the same one you have. According to the sales company there are only two other places here in Japan that have this printer) and we are also getting the EOSINT FORMIGA (for polymer, also uses a CO2 laser but doesn't need Argon, BTW, based on the sample models they gave us this is by far the BEST plastic 3d printer I've seen in my life)
It's not just cheap 3D printers. My workplace has whole collection of professional 3D printers at our disposal: multiple Dimension ABS printer models, an Eden Acrylic printer(hate this one in particular), and a couple of Vantage poly-carbonate printers and we're getting ourselves ready for a million dollars DMLS metal 3D printer. The plastic ones have a malfunction at least once every 4~6 months. The metal one can literally kill you if the Argon gas, used to avoid metal oxidation at high laser temperatures, leaks(death by asphyxiation). 3D printers are just another type of printers after all. Anyone would be just fooling themselves if they think that Stratasys products are more human friendly than the usual HP/Xerox/Cannon/Brother products.
Now back on the original topic. I think the technology is ready for consumer level. But being a consumer product doesn't necessarily make it a mainstream product. 3D printing is useful for people that know how to intelligently use it and already have a specific set of objectives in mind. The average Joe has no business with 3d printing. Buying a 3d printer for an occasional toy/statue that you casually downloaded from the internet is just not worth it. 2D printers succeeded in the mainstream market because everybody NEEDS to print school reports, tax reports, CVs, invitations, tickets, pamphlets, etc.
On top of that 3D printing was(and still is) just immensely overhyped by the internet. Blogs/News websites/Comments and people who never even used a 3D printer before just treated the tech as if it was the ultimate home appliance: "buy a 3D printer and print everything else you need". For example another currently overhyped tech field that will suffer the same "disappointing" effect is VR: occulus/omni/hydra VR paraphernalia is useful for some applications but are far from the "holy grail" of gaming/computing for dozens of reasons. Eventually I believe all these techs will become essential parts of daily life but there are still many obstacles to overcome, from product features and services to user mentality and place in the society.
Someone please mod this guy up. For some reason I never have points when I want them.
Hopefully these guys are the next target. I LOVE their sashimi. Easily my favorite food ever. Eat at least once every week. Too bad according to some projections, they are supposed to go extinct in the next 10 years. Hopefully this tech also helps with the whaling problem as well. I don't like whale meat(and even living in Japan I'm yet to meet a single person who eats whale other than public school lunch) but for some reason Japan loves to kill them.
1) Software can't be patented argument is a lazy and misleading argument. I can describe any piece of hardware(electronics, mechanisms, chemical formulas, etc) as a set of numbers and formulas. Either we get rid of all patents or we make the system harder/more intelligent(no more slide to unlock crap). I don't care which we do as long it makes the lives of us engineers easier. But using misleading arguments do NOT help our cause.
2) Processor architecture is much more than the instruction set. The way interrupts are triggered, the way clock is distributed, the way the pipeline works, how many instructions per clock it can do, along many other factors that change how the actual instructions are arranged. So even if a certain instruction happens to have the same binary for different architectures, depending on the state the processor is it may not work because the internal implementation is different.
3) Processor architectures(and any chip) by themselves are not patented but instead copyrighted(the circuit pattern is basically a set of images). The circuit blocks that compose these chips and architectures may or may not be patented.
Unfortunately that is not how things work. Unless Sony decide to open-source, or at least, release the binary for someone to reverse engineer them, having the PS4 using BSD+AMD combo will have no impact on the open development scene at all. It's going contribute to the BSD driver library as much as OSX, which is also based of BSD, did, i.e. nothing.
Either that or someone jailbreaks the PS4, dumps all it's system files and starts reversing.
Another nice feature would be protecting only patents actually used in products made by the inventor or its partners, in order to take out those so called patent trolls that don't produce anything. If in the future the inventor actually decides to use the patent in an actual product and there is someone already using it there could be some sort of predetermined fee. Obviously I'm oversimplifying the huge problem, but something must be done about those parasites.
Mac is already based of BSD.
The PS4 wasn't even developed in Japan or by a Japanese, hell it will even be released earlier in the US and Europe.
While I agree with most of what you said I'm pretty sure this is false, at least for most part. During E3 they introduced the Japanese guy who designed the PS4 case. Also there is an interview with a Gearbox programmer(forgot his name) he says that they needed 8GB(instead of 4GB) or the PS4 would be dead. So they sent a guy to Japan headquarters in order to get a new devkit. Finally, the new controller was also designed by a Japanese team (there is an Engadget article about it with some AR demos). I don't think the PS4 was entirelly developed in Japan, but most of it's main features came from there. I have no idea about the exact date the PS4 will be released, but it makes sense releasing it first in the West because the holiday season. The Japanese release will follow in a few weeks max(as it's still supposed to come this year) so this fact is not really relevant.
He is talking about the opposite process, akin of the Hackintosh project, i.e., running the PS4 OS and games/apps on your standard PC.
I apologize for the cursing. Nothing personal, sorry. Optical media may suck for some mainstream applications, 480p movies from retail stores being one of them. But the way you wrote your post made me believe the only reason disks are good for movies. Also not all optical disks are created equal. Blu-ray disks are considerably more scratch resistant than CDs and DVDs. Even between DVDs themselves, depending on the materials and burning methods you can have different reliability.
Thanks bro, but I think you should also educated yourself about something called CONTEXT. I know very well that tapes are pretty good media for long term storage and back up for today demands. But compared to a optical disk capable of 1PB storage, they'll lose in pretty much all aspects.
Nice job isolating a single sentence out of my entire post just bring up completely offtopic information just to make a fool of yourself. Congratulations.
Now that they got the procedure I hope they do that with Einstein's brain and, after that, let it rest in peace with the rest of the body. That is assuming that the cellular structure is still intact after half a century inside a jar. Then delete IBM watson and instead install the observed model along side an appropriate bio-physic-chemical engine on the hardware and we can finally enjoy the new age of singularity and no need to think anymore.
How the fuck this comment is tagged Insightful? This is probably one of the biggest displays of ignorance I've seen in a long time. Do you even know how large data centers perform back ups. Using ****ing magnetic tapes(5TB by Fujitu being the biggest I've heard of). Tapes are big, slow as hell and one of the unreliable. A CD sized disk capable of 1PB is a god send. Life is much more than buying shitty DVDs at Costco. And that is only one of the obvious applications for this tech that comes to my mind.
I tried Sony's headset last year and almost forked over $800 for it. Same resolution as the current OR headsets.
Not same. The HMZ has two 720p displays. The current OR DK has one divided in half. Even their newest 1080p prototype, which is a 1080p display divided in half, has a smaller resolution than the HMZ if you count out the unused border pixels. Saying that the new OR is a Full HD device is like saying the 3DS resolution is 240x800.
Anyway the HMZ and OR are two very different products. They both fall under the head mount display category, but the OR is optimized for VR while the HMZ is optimized for movies/TV and "standard" non-immersive gaming.
. But what do we have on the consumer market that can drive 4k displays? Nothin'.
Eyeinfinity capable cards have been able to drive resolutions way beyond 4k using multiple monitors during real time gaming. VR headsets are very niche. People that buy these toys have a beast of a PC already. 4k is nothing. What we need are the actual displays. As for the Mac Pro part of your comment, the Mac Pro is advertising better/faster 4k video and image editing. 4k video output has been available for ages. On top of that the new Mac Pro is still a horrible gaming machine, as it uses workstation/server class components.
-While OR seems to be popular in the internet gaming microcosm, how is the average gamer is going to react to it? Is VR the next "motion controller"? Genuinely useful and interesting, sometimes over-hyped by the media but in the eventually becoming "boring" due to bad/repetitive execution or lack of innovative content?
-Is the business model sustainable? $300(or less) for a very niche device in a company that seems to be under a bubble effect doesn't look very good in the long term. The OR is too expensive for the average Joe but to cheap to print money on the niche market.
-OculusVR has no IP at all(other than a proprietary API and the brand). I could create a competing product prototype today using just scraps. If I can, sony/nintendo/etc can easily do and for much cheaper so there is no reason to pay millions for something you could build it yourself for a few hundred thousands. And if they do, OculusVR is dead as a company. Personally I actually want a competitor to appear soon(I support them but I'm not by any means a fan), I just hope is not an electronics Juggernaut that will destroy the "indie" competition.(although after this E3, I bet my ass sony will be showing off a VR solution(not the HMZ personal display) for the PS4 and maybe even Vita by the next E3.)
-It's a gaming device. An accessory. The gaming industry is worth tens of billions, but almost all this money is on the software side of the industry. Because I see those major consoles sometimes struggling to break even, I think it's safe to say that the OR challenge has just begun and they might actually have some really dark times in the future.
-Is immersion really the holy grail of gaming? Most of the best selling games are not even first person games. Not sure if I should have made a bullet point about it, but it reinforces the idea of niche content.
I applaud the initiative (I even bought a dev kit that hasn't arrived yet) but it's a high risk low return business.
It's been a year since the kickstarter funding and the company formation. They got 2.5M from kickstarter and I suppose another 2.5~3.5 as a personal investment from the current CEO. So they basically had around 6M in the bank at start.
Then they hired a lot of people. I think they have 20 employees in total if my sources are correct. Assuming a average of 100k/person including bonuses/insurance/etc that is at least 2M/year in expenses.
Then there is renting, utilities and taxes. That is another 500k/year at least.
And finally there is the actual development/deployment of the dev kit and promotion(E3 booths, CES, etc) as well as R&D infrastructure build up so there goes most of the rest of the money.
Without this VC investment, I feared they'd sell off and/or close doors in a question of months. I just hope the VCs don't let their "expertise" go out of control.
Please don't trust opinions you read on the internet. Most people who tried it were either journalists(which won't complain about it as it's a "hot" item and they don't want to displease the "hivemind" and lose readers), some game devs(mostly for a similar reason) and fanboys. Plus there is no competition so there is nothing to direct compare it against. The best I can come up with is the HMZ which is designed as a personal display(basically a big 3DTV only you can see) for movies and games, not a VR device. Don't get me wrong, it's a great device. Just overhyped as hell.
This pisses me off, as a former Sony victim I want that company to die horribly. Come on, Sony, follow Microsoft's lead and let Nintendo have the game business!
This is nothing but a display of ignorance. Sony did lot's of bad things in the past indeed, but they're are under the new leadership(Kaz Hirai) since Q1 last year and since them they've been doing quite a lot great things. Open source android projects, semi-open game platforms, restructure of the company and product lines and removal of incompetent staff just to name a few. To demonize the whole company because the poor choices of a few is just not fair.
By the way, your beloved Nintendo has a fair share of black history as well. This whole closed console DRM plagued business is their ****ing invention, let alone their love for proprietary formats.
Given the amount of unsecured network cameras I can easily find with a simple google search, this idea will be a all I can eat buffet. I hope this product is popular between hot chicks.
You forgot the cheapest of them all: the chicken camera stabilizer.