The problem with Glass isn't the core idea of AR, but the implementation. It's drastically under featured (no stereo, one eye only, doesn't cover center of vision) and drastically overpriced with $1500. So far they also have shown nothing for what it's actually good for. To make photos and video a phone seems to be good enough. Notification about email also don't seem to be complicated enough to need Glass. There might be some rare use cases where a hands-free device would be quite useful, but it doesn't seem like something every consumer would need.
Too bad smartphones don't ship with GPS receivers, accelerometers, gyroscopes...
The problem isn't so much the orientation and such, but the fact that Glass doesn't cover your field of view. It's just a small rectangle in the top right, so it can't overlay any information over the real world. The best Glass can do is display some contextual information.
Judging from their latest developer presentation however Glass really seem to be extremely underwhelming. All that they have shown so far wasn't even contextual in any meaningful way, no face detection, map application or anything, it was essentially just used as a notification area to tell you when you had new mail and such. Maybe that was just a side effect of that being a very early demo, but it really looked pretty useless.
The only interesting part of Glass so far seems to be the tiny head mounted camera, but $1500 seems like a rather heavy price for that.
Freespace seems to follow the X-Wing flight model quite closely from what little I have played of it so far. As for more modern stuff, Strike Suit Zero was just released and in the not so distant future we will have Star Citizen, a new Elite and a bunch of smaller titles.
It's not because those games were just particularly amazing, well-written, and well-constructed.
Except for the part that they were. There still aren't really any adventure games on the market that match them even so tons and tons of people have tried. What Daedalic is putting it is getting close, but they still suffer from some polishing issues that LucasArts never had.
Just take the intros to Full Throttle or The Dig, I have a hard time thinking of any modern game that manage to establish that kind of sense of atmosphere and setting.
I know everyone wants to complain about adventure games being dead
The genre had quite a down in the early 2000's, but it hasn't been dead for many years. Not only is TellTale putting out adventure games on a regular basis, we also have Wadjet Eye games, Daedalic, Amanita Design and a whole lot of other companies releasing new games all the time. The Walking Dead even managed to grab numerous Game Of The Year awards. The Daedalic games are probably the closest in style to what LucasArts put out back then.
I chalk this up to nostalgia, rather than the games being better than any other games from the same era.
While Sierra was still trying to kill you in dozens of more or less "funny" ways and allowed you to end up in dead ends, LucasArts practiced essentially modern game design practices and made sure that you couldn't get stuck into dead ends, get killed or otherwise get your gaming experience ruined by obtuse puzzle design. I think that is the main reason why those LucasArts game are so fondly remembered and Sierra not quite so much. When you load up an old LucasArts adventure today it essentially plays not much different then a modern one would, the interface is clean and polished and the game design very straight forward without any ugly surprises. When you load up most other games of that time you are greeted with a rather obtuse interface, unclear game rules and other problems that just make those old games far less tolerable in modern times.
It of course also helps that the games are just damn good, with rememberable characters, great graphics, voice acting and all that.
I think the reason why they don't mention Linux is simply because the thing isn't meant to run Linux software. It doesn't really matter that it uses Linux underneath when you never get to directly access it and instead are limited to whatever layer they strapped on top of it. Android isn't marketed as a Linux for the same reason, the Linux is simply an implementation detail, not an end user visible feature.
The problem aren't government subsidies, but simply that companies in China can produce cheaper solar cells then Bosch can. The solar business is full of companies and lots of competition and it's hard to get a lot of money out of that.
Pure old school story telling was always interactive. It happens when sitting around a campfire or when a father reads a story to his children. The stories are interactive and transform with the way the audience reacts. The completely static and passive storytelling in book form is in terms of human history a rather new invention.
Yep, very much this. It always puzzles me why ads are so crappy on the Internet. Every website these days has all those Web2.0 features, yet ads are still completely passive, I can't rate them, I can't comment on them, I can't even link them and even when I click them they hardly ever lead me to the information about the product I actually seek. What also annoys me a lot is the lack of variety in ads, if I open three tabs on Youtube, chances are they will all play the very same commercial and often one that I already have seen five times before the same day. And finally after all that hubbub about user tracking I have to wonder why ads are still so often so random and out of context, the very best that I have seen so far is that Amazon keeps advertising me products that I already bought the day before, which not very helpful to say the least.
It also would help a lot when companies would be a litter more active in interacting with their user base. For example when it comes to customer product reviews there are frequently persistent issues with the product, stuff that breaks, bad documentation or whatever, where is the company support guy actually answering those issues? The only times I ever the active support is from indie game developers, everybody else either doesn't interact with the customers at all or only via generic copy&paste text snipes that completely fail to actually address the issue.
It took years to go from Dreamfall to TLJ, and yet they still talked about publishing the third in the story for so long.
You can blame The Secret World for that. Originally Dreamfall should have been followed up swiftly by sequel, but Funcom apparently changed plans and moved all the staff to The Secret World MMORPG. For some reason they then still announced Dreamfall: Chapters, even so everybody was busy working on The Secret World. Then of course TSW got delayed quite a bit and took years to develop and once it was done Funcom decided to stop making single-player games all together, which is why the next Dreamfall is now done by a separate company, but filled with all the old developers.
What I find a little surprising is that Dreamfall: Chapters has a far harder time making money then those old RPGs. When it comes to storytelling in games The Longest Journey and Planescape Torment are almost always mentioned as one of the best examples, yet Dreamfall: Chapters, which is a sequel to TLJ, has only made 1.2mil so far, enough to get funded, but it took them 25 days, not a few hours. Guess there are a lot more old RPG gamers then adventure gamers around.
How difficulty is it actually to reach the temperatures used for super-conductors in a every day setting (say for cooling a CPU)? Maybe we don't need a breakthrough in super conducting materials, but just better refrigerators?
I think the core problem is simply that aesthetically Crysis 3 is a pretty ugly game, they overuse vignetting a lot and the way they tone map their HDR leads to far to many blacks. It doesn't help that the level design is extremely restrictive, so you never get to see any large open areas like you could back with Crysis 1. All of this makes the game feel quite fake. It essentially tries to imitate the look of summer block busters, not reality. It of course doesn't help that the game takes place in a destroyed city with rubble and military all around.
Now on a pure technical level the engine is quite impressive, but it's easy to overlook that when the overall game just feels ugly.
No, that was just a theoretical example of how a secure 'sed' could be build. I don't think it's actually implemented that way anywhere, not even sure if it's possible with SELinux, but it might. The point I was trying to make is simply that you can build a highly flexible toolset (i.e. the Unix toolbox) in a way that has no direct system access.
user education should be printed in all caps, bold, underlined, comic sans, etc...
If the user can break the OS, then the OS wasn't secure enough. It should be completely impossible to get the OS into a state where it's unrecoverable or unverifiable. If the OS fails at that, blame the OS, not the user, maybe then we get some progress in computer security.
I think the point is no encryption is going to protect you from users installing malware, buggy software, or just plain hand over data unknowingly.
That's a problem of the current day extremely fragile OS design. Stuff a user installs should simply never have the right to do any damage. Just like a HTML app is strictly sandboxed and can't access your whole HDD, so should a native executable. You don't really have to worry about malware when its locked up in a sandbox and can't even modify itself.
To make quick Unix example of how things should work:
Wrong way: sed "s/foo/bar/" file Right way: cat file | sed "s/foo/bar/"
In the first one 'sed' has all the rights the user has and can do whatever it wants behind the users back. In the second case 'sed' needs absolutely no rights at all aside from being able to read stdin and could be completely sandboxed away. It's 'cat' that has the right to access users files and pass the data down the line to other programs. Thus instead of having dozens or hundreds of apps with file access, you have just one. Similar concepts can be adopted to the GUI easily where the file dialog (the GUIs 'cat' equivalent) becomes part of the OS instead of the application.
Memoto is the only product I know of that is actually targeted at consumers for life logging, but it's rather low tech as it's only pictures from what I understand. Taser Axon Flex is another product and can do full video, but it's geared for police use, not consumer use. Once released, Google Glass might of course be the obvious solution, but so far Google hasn't really said anything if it actually supports life logging, as all the demo videos so far had the user trigger the record, it's also not known if the battery life will be enough for life logging.
Don't really know if there is anything on the software side with good support for life logging. Making the pictures is the easy part, finding the picture you are searching for in hundreds of thousands of images is not so easy. So something with face/voice/text recognition for automatic tagging would be interesting. Memoto seems to come with some apps, but no idea how good they are.
If you are looking for an entry point into Doctor Who, watch the episode Blink, it's incredible well done and probably the most fun take on time travel since Back to the Future. If you don't like that one, then yeah, Doctor Who ain't for you, as it doesn't get better then that, but that episode it worth a try either way.
Re:Whenever anyone mentions cheap VR headsets....
on
Carmack On VR Latency
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· Score: 1
Turns out that Palmer himself actually was involved in one of those iPhone add ons.
Re:Whenever anyone mentions cheap VR headsets....
on
Carmack On VR Latency
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· Score: 1
1) Oculus has a single 1280x800 display, not two 2) The FOV is just a matter what lenses you stick over the display 3) iPhones have tracking too 4) A little plastic thing you put on your iPhone is cheap as well (iPhone not so much)
No, I am not claiming that a crappy iPhone add on is as good as the Rift, Rift obviously had put a bunch more thought put into it. I am just remarking how closely related that cheap gimmick is to the Rift. It's very similar technology, the Rift just has a lot more polish and fine tuning done to it.
Re:Whenever anyone mentions cheap VR headsets....
on
Carmack On VR Latency
·
· Score: 1
Yep. The fun part is that this isn't even much a joke, the Oculus Rift is essentially that thing, just in a nicer box. There where even iPhone add ons that did stereo and head tracking. Kind of funny how some cheap crap from the shopping channel and the future of virtual reality are just inches apart.
Slashdot Mirror
The problem with Glass isn't the core idea of AR, but the implementation. It's drastically under featured (no stereo, one eye only, doesn't cover center of vision) and drastically overpriced with $1500. So far they also have shown nothing for what it's actually good for. To make photos and video a phone seems to be good enough. Notification about email also don't seem to be complicated enough to need Glass. There might be some rare use cases where a hands-free device would be quite useful, but it doesn't seem like something every consumer would need.
Too bad smartphones don't ship with GPS receivers, accelerometers, gyroscopes...
The problem isn't so much the orientation and such, but the fact that Glass doesn't cover your field of view. It's just a small rectangle in the top right, so it can't overlay any information over the real world. The best Glass can do is display some contextual information.
Judging from their latest developer presentation however Glass really seem to be extremely underwhelming. All that they have shown so far wasn't even contextual in any meaningful way, no face detection, map application or anything, it was essentially just used as a notification area to tell you when you had new mail and such. Maybe that was just a side effect of that being a very early demo, but it really looked pretty useless.
The only interesting part of Glass so far seems to be the tiny head mounted camera, but $1500 seems like a rather heavy price for that.
Freespace seems to follow the X-Wing flight model quite closely from what little I have played of it so far. As for more modern stuff, Strike Suit Zero was just released and in the not so distant future we will have Star Citizen, a new Elite and a bunch of smaller titles.
What did you have to do to die in that game?
Not picking up the Idol would do that, but you had 10 minutes time...
It's not because those games were just particularly amazing, well-written, and well-constructed.
Except for the part that they were. There still aren't really any adventure games on the market that match them even so tons and tons of people have tried. What Daedalic is putting it is getting close, but they still suffer from some polishing issues that LucasArts never had.
Just take the intros to Full Throttle or The Dig, I have a hard time thinking of any modern game that manage to establish that kind of sense of atmosphere and setting.
I know everyone wants to complain about adventure games being dead
The genre had quite a down in the early 2000's, but it hasn't been dead for many years. Not only is TellTale putting out adventure games on a regular basis, we also have Wadjet Eye games, Daedalic, Amanita Design and a whole lot of other companies releasing new games all the time. The Walking Dead even managed to grab numerous Game Of The Year awards. The Daedalic games are probably the closest in style to what LucasArts put out back then.
I chalk this up to nostalgia, rather than the games being better than any other games from the same era.
While Sierra was still trying to kill you in dozens of more or less "funny" ways and allowed you to end up in dead ends, LucasArts practiced essentially modern game design practices and made sure that you couldn't get stuck into dead ends, get killed or otherwise get your gaming experience ruined by obtuse puzzle design. I think that is the main reason why those LucasArts game are so fondly remembered and Sierra not quite so much. When you load up an old LucasArts adventure today it essentially plays not much different then a modern one would, the interface is clean and polished and the game design very straight forward without any ugly surprises. When you load up most other games of that time you are greeted with a rather obtuse interface, unclear game rules and other problems that just make those old games far less tolerable in modern times.
It of course also helps that the games are just damn good, with rememberable characters, great graphics, voice acting and all that.
Since when did Hulu expand to a country that uses pounds as its currency?
MediaHint is a Firefox plugin that makes Hulu work in countries where it otherwise would not.
I think the reason why they don't mention Linux is simply because the thing isn't meant to run Linux software. It doesn't really matter that it uses Linux underneath when you never get to directly access it and instead are limited to whatever layer they strapped on top of it. Android isn't marketed as a Linux for the same reason, the Linux is simply an implementation detail, not an end user visible feature.
But I'm also aware without government subsidies,
The problem aren't government subsidies, but simply that companies in China can produce cheaper solar cells then Bosch can. The solar business is full of companies and lots of competition and it's hard to get a lot of money out of that.
Pure old school story telling was always interactive. It happens when sitting around a campfire or when a father reads a story to his children. The stories are interactive and transform with the way the audience reacts. The completely static and passive storytelling in book form is in terms of human history a rather new invention.
Background has to be static for it to work.
Nope
Yep, very much this. It always puzzles me why ads are so crappy on the Internet. Every website these days has all those Web2.0 features, yet ads are still completely passive, I can't rate them, I can't comment on them, I can't even link them and even when I click them they hardly ever lead me to the information about the product I actually seek. What also annoys me a lot is the lack of variety in ads, if I open three tabs on Youtube, chances are they will all play the very same commercial and often one that I already have seen five times before the same day. And finally after all that hubbub about user tracking I have to wonder why ads are still so often so random and out of context, the very best that I have seen so far is that Amazon keeps advertising me products that I already bought the day before, which not very helpful to say the least.
It also would help a lot when companies would be a litter more active in interacting with their user base. For example when it comes to customer product reviews there are frequently persistent issues with the product, stuff that breaks, bad documentation or whatever, where is the company support guy actually answering those issues? The only times I ever the active support is from indie game developers, everybody else either doesn't interact with the customers at all or only via generic copy&paste text snipes that completely fail to actually address the issue.
It took years to go from Dreamfall to TLJ, and yet they still talked about publishing the third in the story for so long.
You can blame The Secret World for that. Originally Dreamfall should have been followed up swiftly by sequel, but Funcom apparently changed plans and moved all the staff to The Secret World MMORPG. For some reason they then still announced Dreamfall: Chapters, even so everybody was busy working on The Secret World. Then of course TSW got delayed quite a bit and took years to develop and once it was done Funcom decided to stop making single-player games all together, which is why the next Dreamfall is now done by a separate company, but filled with all the old developers.
What I find a little surprising is that Dreamfall: Chapters has a far harder time making money then those old RPGs. When it comes to storytelling in games The Longest Journey and Planescape Torment are almost always mentioned as one of the best examples, yet Dreamfall: Chapters, which is a sequel to TLJ, has only made 1.2mil so far, enough to get funded, but it took them 25 days, not a few hours. Guess there are a lot more old RPG gamers then adventure gamers around.
How difficulty is it actually to reach the temperatures used for super-conductors in a every day setting (say for cooling a CPU)? Maybe we don't need a breakthrough in super conducting materials, but just better refrigerators?
I think the core problem is simply that aesthetically Crysis 3 is a pretty ugly game, they overuse vignetting a lot and the way they tone map their HDR leads to far to many blacks. It doesn't help that the level design is extremely restrictive, so you never get to see any large open areas like you could back with Crysis 1. All of this makes the game feel quite fake. It essentially tries to imitate the look of summer block busters, not reality. It of course doesn't help that the game takes place in a destroyed city with rubble and military all around.
Now on a pure technical level the engine is quite impressive, but it's easy to overlook that when the overall game just feels ugly.
No, that was just a theoretical example of how a secure 'sed' could be build. I don't think it's actually implemented that way anywhere, not even sure if it's possible with SELinux, but it might. The point I was trying to make is simply that you can build a highly flexible toolset (i.e. the Unix toolbox) in a way that has no direct system access.
user education should be printed in all caps, bold, underlined, comic sans, etc...
If the user can break the OS, then the OS wasn't secure enough. It should be completely impossible to get the OS into a state where it's unrecoverable or unverifiable. If the OS fails at that, blame the OS, not the user, maybe then we get some progress in computer security.
I think the point is no encryption is going to protect you from users installing malware, buggy software, or just plain hand over data unknowingly.
That's a problem of the current day extremely fragile OS design. Stuff a user installs should simply never have the right to do any damage. Just like a HTML app is strictly sandboxed and can't access your whole HDD, so should a native executable. You don't really have to worry about malware when its locked up in a sandbox and can't even modify itself.
To make quick Unix example of how things should work:
Wrong way: sed "s/foo/bar/" file
Right way: cat file | sed "s/foo/bar/"
In the first one 'sed' has all the rights the user has and can do whatever it wants behind the users back. In the second case 'sed' needs absolutely no rights at all aside from being able to read stdin and could be completely sandboxed away. It's 'cat' that has the right to access users files and pass the data down the line to other programs. Thus instead of having dozens or hundreds of apps with file access, you have just one. Similar concepts can be adopted to the GUI easily where the file dialog (the GUIs 'cat' equivalent) becomes part of the OS instead of the application.
Memoto is the only product I know of that is actually targeted at consumers for life logging, but it's rather low tech as it's only pictures from what I understand. Taser Axon Flex is another product and can do full video, but it's geared for police use, not consumer use. Once released, Google Glass might of course be the obvious solution, but so far Google hasn't really said anything if it actually supports life logging, as all the demo videos so far had the user trigger the record, it's also not known if the battery life will be enough for life logging.
Don't really know if there is anything on the software side with good support for life logging. Making the pictures is the easy part, finding the picture you are searching for in hundreds of thousands of images is not so easy. So something with face/voice/text recognition for automatic tagging would be interesting. Memoto seems to come with some apps, but no idea how good they are.
If you are looking for an entry point into Doctor Who, watch the episode Blink, it's incredible well done and probably the most fun take on time travel since Back to the Future. If you don't like that one, then yeah, Doctor Who ain't for you, as it doesn't get better then that, but that episode it worth a try either way.
Turns out that Palmer himself actually was involved in one of those iPhone add ons.
1) Oculus has a single 1280x800 display, not two
2) The FOV is just a matter what lenses you stick over the display
3) iPhones have tracking too
4) A little plastic thing you put on your iPhone is cheap as well (iPhone not so much)
No, I am not claiming that a crappy iPhone add on is as good as the Rift, Rift obviously had put a bunch more thought put into it. I am just remarking how closely related that cheap gimmick is to the Rift. It's very similar technology, the Rift just has a lot more polish and fine tuning done to it.
Yep. The fun part is that this isn't even much a joke, the Oculus Rift is essentially that thing, just in a nicer box. There where even iPhone add ons that did stereo and head tracking. Kind of funny how some cheap crap from the shopping channel and the future of virtual reality are just inches apart.