They say so themselves. Yes it is immersive in one way that what is beyond the window really seems to be there because it reacts to parallax motion. Very cool.
But that is only part of the deal: to be really immersed, wouldn't you need to have the remote scene _around you_ rather than through a window? To me, the #1 key to making any kind of VR more immersive is simply put, a larger percent of the FOV of your eyes (which is up to 220x130 degrees) being covered by an image of the scene in correct perspective. Because you don't see any "window borders" anymore, the technique used by these people becomes less vital, and in fact comes for free depending on where you get your image data from.
It is not all that difficult (though correct application requires fisheye lenses and/or 3d engines), and seems to be ignored by 95% of new VR products. It is stunning to see VR-goggles and such that have similar eye-FOV to a 17" monitor at 2 feet (i.e. 30 degrees at best), once you check the specs. Pointless. Their product is much better because atleast you are "immersed at a distance", but it doesn't solve the "full immersion challenge".
I studied "computational linguistics" for 5 years, and if there's one thing that I got out of it is that this whole endeavour (NL parsing + understanding) is hopeless.
Natural language is ambiguous way beyond peoples imagination, and if there's anything we don't need it is ambiguity in giving commands to a computer. NL doesn't _seem_ ambiguous because we are so good at disambiguating it (most of the time, anyway) using our own extensive knowledge base, about what is "reasonable". For a computer to have access to a similar knowledge base (simulating a brain, in short), is a pretty impossible task at this point in time.
Yes, we can get away with simple hacks and partial functionality, but what good is that? it will still be ambiguous. If you want a CLI interface and you want to move away from programming language style stuff, the least you have to do is define a language that can only be parsed and interpreted in one way. This won't be natural language, so user will have to learn its peculiarities. It's a shame, but deal with it.
If I can generalise for a moment, this whole idea that we need an UI that is closer to people to make computers easier to use for computer illiterates is very shaky. The fact that we can talk to it (through the proposed CLI, or speech) isn't making the computer any easier! Do you think that because I can now say "view attachment" instead of clicking on a button, that this will help Joe AverageUser understand any better why part of his HD was wiped, and why all his email contacts got spammed with a virus? Does it help him understand where his file is stored after he uttered "write file to disk"?
There are tons of (relatively easy) things we can do to make a computer easier to use, but this particular one won't bridge the gap once single bit.
Buffer overflows can be tackled at many levels, but to me only the language one makes sense. We've had >50 years of computing and we are still firmly entrenched in using languages where we have to do bounds checking manually! efficiency shouldn't be an issue either.
with e-commerce being a big hype, isn't it odd that there is no easy way to pay very small amounts? I bet a significant percentage of non payers are because it is too much hassle to pay. If there were a way to transfer small amounts of money, lots of cool ways to earn money could pop up arount the net.
Separating "small amounts" from "large amounts" is important because it is a fundamentally different thing. Small amount could do with less security, simpler transactions etc. Transactions towards large amounts could only happen in bulk.
When are people going to realise that problems like this could never have happened if things were programmed in a secure language (like *cough* Java, or I assume also C# soon) ? How many bugs/crashes/problems are caused by the fact that we insist on continuing to use C/C++?
It is pretty expensive trying to render every pixel on screen with the same amount of quality 60 times a second... why not use this technology to only render in the nicest possible way and in maximum detail the small area the player is looking at, and render the rest with all possible shortcuts?
Not the whole 3d engine can be made faster this way, but significant gains in fillrate and geometry (using x/y specific LOD) can be obtained. Plus it becomes more attractive to use very expensive rendering techniques (high quality antialiasing, per pixel dynamic lighting) for the focal point.
...why should this be any more real than previous attempts?
Because this is the first "attempt" where Amiga Inc. doesn't have a parent company above it to choke it with bureaucracy and side interests. The current Amiga team has no focus besides making this "attempt" a succes, which is for the first time in 7 or so years.
Besides, what does this have to do with the "original" Amiga? Nothing but the name.
Yup. But I consider this a good thing. And one thing we will definitely inherit from the old system is its philosophy: simple, small, fast, elegant.
Slashdot Mirror
They say so themselves. Yes it is immersive in one way that what is beyond the window really seems to be there because it reacts to parallax motion. Very cool.
But that is only part of the deal: to be really immersed, wouldn't you need to have the remote scene _around you_ rather than through a window? To me, the #1 key to making any kind of VR more immersive is simply put, a larger percent of the FOV of your eyes (which is up to 220x130 degrees) being covered by an image of the scene in correct perspective. Because you don't see any "window borders" anymore, the technique used by these people becomes less vital, and in fact comes for free depending on where you get your image data from.
It is not all that difficult (though correct application requires fisheye lenses and/or 3d engines), and seems to be ignored by 95% of new VR products. It is stunning to see VR-goggles and such that have similar eye-FOV to a 17" monitor at 2 feet (i.e. 30 degrees at best), once you check the specs. Pointless. Their product is much better because atleast you are "immersed at a distance", but it doesn't solve the "full immersion challenge".
If you rank people in order of influence they had on the computer industry, he'd rank pretty high up there (I reckon #3). Think of it.
Overal, a pretty clueless list. I didn't know all these big fat conservative corporations caused our progress...
I studied "computational linguistics" for 5 years, and if there's one thing that I got out of it is that this whole endeavour (NL parsing + understanding) is hopeless.
Natural language is ambiguous way beyond peoples imagination, and if there's anything we don't need it is ambiguity in giving commands to a computer. NL doesn't _seem_ ambiguous because we are so good at disambiguating it (most of the time, anyway) using our own extensive knowledge base, about what is "reasonable". For a computer to have access to a similar knowledge base (simulating a brain, in short), is a pretty impossible task at this point in time.
Yes, we can get away with simple hacks and partial functionality, but what good is that? it will still be ambiguous. If you want a CLI interface and you want to move away from programming language style stuff, the least you have to do is define a language that can only be parsed and interpreted in one way. This won't be natural language, so user will have to learn its peculiarities. It's a shame, but deal with it.
If I can generalise for a moment, this whole idea that we need an UI that is closer to people to make computers easier to use for computer illiterates is very shaky. The fact that we can talk to it (through the proposed CLI, or speech) isn't making the computer any easier! Do you think that because I can now say "view attachment" instead of clicking on a button, that this will help Joe AverageUser understand any better why part of his HD was wiped, and why all his email contacts got spammed with a virus? Does it help him understand where his file is stored after he uttered "write file to disk"?
There are tons of (relatively easy) things we can do to make a computer easier to use, but this particular one won't bridge the gap once single bit.
Buffer overflows can be tackled at many levels, but to me only the language one makes sense. We've had >50 years of computing and we are still firmly entrenched in using languages where we have to do bounds checking manually! efficiency shouldn't be an issue either.
with e-commerce being a big hype, isn't it odd that there is no easy way to pay very small amounts? I bet a significant percentage of non payers are because it is too much hassle to pay. If there were a way to transfer small amounts of money, lots of cool ways to earn money could pop up arount the net.
Separating "small amounts" from "large amounts" is important because it is a fundamentally different thing. Small amount could do with less security, simpler transactions etc. Transactions towards large amounts could only happen in bulk.
When are people going to realise that problems like this could never have happened if things were programmed in a secure language (like *cough* Java, or I assume also C# soon) ? How many bugs/crashes/problems are caused by the fact that we insist on continuing to use C/C++?
It is pretty expensive trying to render every pixel on screen with the same amount of quality 60 times a second... why not use this technology to only render in the nicest possible way and in maximum detail the small area the player is looking at, and render the rest with all possible shortcuts?
Not the whole 3d engine can be made faster this way, but significant gains in fillrate and geometry (using x/y specific LOD) can be obtained. Plus it becomes more attractive to use very expensive rendering techniques (high quality antialiasing, per pixel dynamic lighting) for the focal point.
as monitor stands for this bulky 17" thing. they are very sturdy and reliable.
...why should this be any more real than previous attempts?
Because this is the first "attempt" where Amiga Inc. doesn't have a parent company above it to choke it with bureaucracy and side interests. The current Amiga team has no focus besides making this "attempt" a succes, which is for the first time in 7 or so years.
Besides, what does this have to do with the "original" Amiga? Nothing but the name.
Yup. But I consider this a good thing. And one thing we will definitely inherit from the old system is its philosophy: simple, small, fast, elegant.
wouter@amiga.com