HN Gopher Feed (2017-10-12) - page 1 of 10 ___________________________________________________________________
John Carmack's Keynote at Oculus 4 Live Stream [video]
196 points by staunch
https://www.facebook.com/oculusvr/videos/vb.270208243080697/1189...0697/1189602884474557/?type=3&theater___________________________________________________________________
obiefernandez - 1 hours ago
This stuff is compelling, especially after having recently read
Ready Player One. However, how do you type? There's all this talk
of how this tech is great for programmers, with tons more screen
space, etc... but unless I just missed it somehow, don't see where
a normal keyboard fits into the picture.
zlynx - 1 hours ago
I already use a Das Ultimate keyboard. No key caps. It's pretty
straightforward to learn the keyboard if you don't fall back on
looking. It's like full immersion in a foreign language. If you
_have_ remember things, then you will.So I can type while
wearing an Oculus Rift. It's not a problem. And I'm sure you can
do it too.
dEnigma - 10 minutes ago
>No key capsI think you mean "blank key caps". The alternative
could be pretty painful, depending on the type of switch.
obiefernandez - 46 minutes ago
That's not exactly what I mean. It looks like most VR rigs
these days are using some sort of control thing that you hold
in your hand. Doesn't look like you could type (with more than
one finger of each hand) and hold it at the same time.On the
other hand, maybe lightweight haptic gloves are a thing already
and I just don't know about it.
dEnigma - 9 minutes ago
Maybe some kind of (improved) Leap Motion finger tracking
combined with a virtual keyboard would be acceptable?
shkkmo - 3 hours ago
Is there any good software yet for Gear VR (which could thus be
used on Oculus Go) for emulating multiple monitors?
shkkmo - 2 hours ago
Well, I did my own research and thus does more or less what I
would want, but only works on Rift and Vive:
http://store.steampowered.com/app/382110/Virtual_Desktop/This
rather complicated process does work with Gear VR (and so should
work with Oculus Go), but seems to only support one monitor (and
streams only games?): https://www.vrheads.com/how-stream-your-pc-
desktop-your-gear...
munchbunny - 2 hours ago
Might be worth asking why you want it? Simulated monitor(s) in VR
on the first generation of VR hardware run into blurriness
problems from having low resolution displays relative to the
monitors they're simulating.
shkkmo - 2 hours ago
I work remotely and travel all the time. It would be great to
have a VR headset that doesn't require a desktop and provides
expanded screen real estate. I know this is something that many
people besides myself want.The oculus go sounds like it solves
the major blocking issue since it is stand alone and thus
doesn't depend on the computer for the 3d rendering capacity.
There is still the question of if using the VR device for work
is feasible/productive, but at least it is now possible which I
why I was curious as to if any such software exists.Some of the
resolution mismatch could be solved by simply expanding the
virtual screen and/or setting the computer to display at a
lower resolution so that the resolutions match closer. Some of
this is probably helped by using a cylindrical surface in the
VR environment.
Hupriene - 1 hours ago
The resolution you would have to use to do this without
excessive head movement would probably be more appropriate
for mobile UI than desktop UI. I don't think the current gen
headsets can provide a satisfactory Excel experience for
example. Also, the relatively small 'sweet spot' that
current gen headsets provide make extended reading
uncomfortable since it requires head movement for what would
usually be accomplished by eye movement.
cormman - 3 hours ago
What do you mean, like streamed through VNC? You can't run
windows on the Go obviously so do you mean android monitors? I
don't even think android supports multiple monitors.Basically the
answer is nope
mileycyrusXOXO - 4 hours ago
I think John Carmack is one of my favorite people to watch present.
If you haven't watched his long rants about using FP in game dev @
QuakeCon a few years back you should.It was QuakeCon 2013, although
I'm not sure which part:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=VUxcVzpeFqc
johansch - 4 hours ago
Yeah, he is really quite good at this. (I wonder if it came
naturally to him, or if it's just a matter of practicing very
regularly for like 20 years?)I wish he would give Elon Musk some
mentoring on how to communicate with a technical audience. Or
just a regular audience, I guess.
nabla9 - 2 hours ago
Carmack used to have serious speech tick where he would always
say hmmm at the end of the sentence. It has gradually wanished
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ivfG64QUeH4&feature=youtu.be...
Often when something looks easy and efortless there is lots of
work behind it.
srb- - 1 hours ago
For a while he was saying "on there" all the time too. But I
think that has been reduced in his recent talks.Public
speaking well is hard. Most are not good at it, myself
included.That said, I'll take a poor speaker (Musk, older
Carmack) over a PR drone any day.
__s - 1 hours ago
Linked video is still a great talk. Carmack comes off as
someone who could talk about anything for a literal
fortnight, so the 'mmm' may've been a tick where he was
forcing himself to shutup & let the interview continue
whatever_dude - 1 hours ago
He still has it, he just says "aye" instead.I remember he
said he had some kind of training on how to deal with the
"hmmm" and it got better, but the "aye" remains.(Not
complaining, I loved his talks before with all "hmmms" and
still do, "aye" and all)
stcredzero - 1 hours ago
but the "aye" remainsIt's an engineer thing. Like Scotty
from ST:TOS.
johansch - 3 hours ago
I found a really odd video of him speaking in
1998:https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hnJDQKcaS8gSo yeah, he was
good back then too.
derefr - 4 hours ago
I'm under the hypothesis that (good) game developers know how
to talk to people (or at least how to present things to people)
because part of game design is thinking about how to
manipulate people's emotions into wanting to (or even being
eager to!) face a challenge you've set out for them.It's
similar but not identical to the reasoning for actors and
directors to be good entertainers and interviewers. Those folks
constantly think about manipulating people's emotions in
general, but game design is completely focussed on just
manipulating people into excitement or flow states ? and that
just so happens to be the emotion you (usually) want people to
have in reaction to a presentation: the feeling of "I'm going
to go out? and buy their thing ?and change the world."
mistermann - 4 hours ago
Great perspective.
vvanders - 3 hours ago
I think it's less this and more that being able to present
this information is the mark of a really good technical
leader.
yllaucaj - 3 hours ago
I like that idea. It's also true that a field like game
development, which is both collaborative and
interdisciplinary, pretty much requires excellent
communication skills. Being a game designer is less about
having amazing "ideas" or "vision" (everyone has those) and
more about your ability to align everyone's ideas and vision
in the same direction.Personally, I prefer to describe
"thinking about manipulating people's emotions" as _empathy_,
but that's just me.
derefr - 3 hours ago
> Personally, I prefer to describe "thinking about
manipulating people's emotions" as _empathy_, but that's
just me.Empathy is the core skill, yes, but there's a sort
of... I almost want to say an instinctual disgust? that
people also have to overcome, when they want to turn
empathy around to use it to change someone else's mind,
rather than just using it to predict someone else's mind.
You have to become at least a little bit of a sociopath, is
maybe the problem.See, other people have different
foundational beliefs?different axioms they're working from.
To use "empathy aikido" on them?to come up with arguments
that will convince them of something, not slowly and
laboriously from logical first principles, but by building
up quickly from what they already assume to be true?you
have to be willing to make arguments that are true under
their axioms, but not under yours. That is, you have to be
willing to use arguments that you think are false, just
because the person you're trying to convince will believe
them.It feels weirdly like lying; like you're a politician
swaying the populace with empty rhetoric. But you're not
saying things that nobody would believe (if given long
enough to think about them); you're instead just getting
into the head of?empathizing with?the person who holds
those axioms, and then saying things that you?as that
person?really do believe.This is why, I think, there's a
big divide between people who like or hate the idea of
"salesmanship": some people fundamentally see it as lying,
while other people fundamentally see it as
empathizing.Personally, I think it can end up either
way?some people "sell" an idea while holding back a bunch
of facts that, under their axioms, are total deal-breakers.
Others, though, "build a bridge" between their
interlocutor's world-model and their own, using their
arguments to help the other person build a world-model
enough like their own that they can then present the facts
that they believe to the listener, and the listener can
understand them through the "consensus schema?" they
built.?
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Schema_(psychology)People who
are said to have "reality distortion fields", I'm guessing,
are just good at making those kind of points that build a
consensus schema, that they can then state plain "facts"
against which will seem?within the consensus schema?to be
obvious, rather than having to convince you of each fact
through argument. Despite the gnawing feeling that
accepting that consensus schema into your brain is sort of
an indoctrination into a cult, it's really the less
ethically questionable of the two options, in my mind: the
speaker doesn't have to say anything they don't actually
believe (other than the arguments required to build the
consensus schema.)
zazen - moments ago
Thank you for this comment - that's a really striking way
of looking at these things. Makes me wonder just how
many human interactions involve being that little bit of
a sociopath. E.g., "putting your best foot forward" for
a job interview or first date can feel like a kind of
dishonesty, although it's expected in those cases. I
wonder how you could start drawing a definitive line
between "good" empathic manipulation and "bad"
sociopathic manipulation, when even just smiling at
someone can be manipulation of a sort?
andrei_says_ - 2 hours ago
Empathy = understanding the other, including on emotional
level in such a way that the other feels understood.Nothing
to do with changing them.If the other did not feel that
deep understanding, empathy did not take place.Source: I
teach empathy with a worldview rooted in nonviolent
communication. This is the definition I use; it is not
universal.
Tarq0n - 4 hours ago
Carmack is more of a game engine engineer than a game
designer, as evidenced by the lacklustre design of id games
after Romero left.
porfirium - 3 hours ago
Romero did not leave, Carmack fired him, in his own words,
for "not working hard enough."
clebio - 3 hours ago
Why the downvotes?
sciurus - 42 minutes ago
Citation:
https://www.bluesnews.com/articles/carmackinterview.html
tapoxi - 3 hours ago
Quake III Arena (Graeme Devine) was a fantastic game,
although Doom 3 and RAGE weren't particularly
inspiring.Doom (2016) was released after Carmack left, but
it's one of the best shooters they've made.
erikj - 4 hours ago
Quake 3 Arena is still one of the best multiplayer shooters
ever, so I can't agree with your statement.
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Koshkin - 3 hours ago
While surely being a marvel of software engineering and
level design, it had nothing in common with Quake I and
II. It is not my intent to be critical here, but QA3 felt
like a circus, especially compared with other multiplayer
shooters such as the original Unreal Tournament, which
had a wonderful mysterious atmosphere to it.
wlesieutre - 1 hours ago
I was just playing something recently and thought "This
feels like an Unreal Tournament Space Castle." Can't
remember what game it was.UT99 had some fantastic level
design. Facing Worlds, Phobos, HyperBlast, Deck 16,
Coret, etc.
AgentME - 1 hours ago
It has great game mechanics, but in all other manners of
design it feels like a hodgepodge of unrelated assets
thrown together. Quake 1 had a similar problem early in
development, but they managed to tie it together. Quake 3
didn't even bother with a true singleplayer campaign,
which seems like a winning move in hindsight, but at the
time it was a departure from the norm and I can't help
but feel like it was a move they did out of necessity.
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kilroy123 - 1 hours ago
You're being downvoted, but I do agree. Musk isn't a very good
speaker and he seemed very nervous at his IAC talk about
colonizing Mars.
mtgx - 3 hours ago
Carmack really should have quit Oculus when Facebook bought it
and gone on to work for Musk at SpaceX. Both are workaholics,
too, so they'd probably get along quite well. Plus, Carmack is
a big fan of space rockets.Perhaps Musk needs to go to him and
tell him, Steve Jobs-style:"Do you want to work for a company
that invades people's privacy for the rest of your life, or do
you want to come with me and change the world?"Carmack's skills
are being wasted at Facebook.
rwc - 2 hours ago
Perhaps he got burnt out on
space...https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Armadillo_Aerospace
__s - 1 hours ago
Last history bit claims> As of August 2013, Carmack was
"actively looking for outside investors to restart work on
the company?s rockets"Before stating assets were sold,
likely due to lack of investment. SpaceX has the
investment. Carmack & Musk also exchange tweets re rocketry
at times
whatever_dude - 1 hours ago
Musk has already offered Carmack a job a couple of times on
twitter. Not verbatim but it was close to that line.
__s - 1 hours ago
Citation: https://www.reddit.com/r/spacex/comments/32nie3/e
lon_musk_on...
Arjuna - 3 hours ago
This is the part... John discusses his functional programming
adventures in Haskell at QuakeCon 2013."So what I set out to do
was take the original Wolfenstein 3D, and re-implement it in
Haskell."[...]"I've got a few conclusions coming from it. One of
them is that, there's still the question about static vs dynamic.
I know that there was a survey just coming out recently where the
majority of programmers are still really not behind static
typing. I know that there's the two orthogonal axes about whether
types are strong or weak, and whether it's static or dynamic. I
come down really pretty firmly, all my experience continues to
push me towards this way, that strong, static typing has really
significant benefits. Sometimes it's not comfortable, sometimes
you have to build up a tight scaffolding to do something that
should be really easy, but there are real, strong wins to
it."https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Uooh0Y9fC_M#t=4876(Starts at
approximately 1:21:16 in case the direct link doesn't work
correctly.)
hellofunk - 2 hours ago
Thanks very much for sharing this. Awesome.
meta_AU - 2 hours ago
Another great quote from that same talk is akong the lines
of"Any syntactically valid code, that the compiler will accept,
will eventually make it into your code base."
brador - 5 hours ago
Any restreams that don't require a login?Edit found one:
https://youtube.com/watch?v=sjOKx5yntC4
mciancia - 4 hours ago
Huh, really good quality. Wonder what kind of hardware they are
using for that stream
sp332 - 5 hours ago
Try using a private window. It only makes you log in if it
detects certain FB cookies and thinks you're a user.
amatecha - 5 hours ago
Nice, that one's a 360-degree livestream, too! Thanks :)
JosephLark - 4 hours ago
Just had an interesting experience with that. I moved the frame
so that it showed the timer countdown and screens as well as
John. After it hit 0, they put up "Please go to Q&A". After a
minute or so they started flashing it from the white text on
black background to a bright white screen to get his attention.
After a couple rounds of that, John goes "Please stop flashing
the go to Q&A, I'll get to it" and they stopped the flashing.
Certainly something I wouldn't have seen otherwise.Also
interesting seeing now what is close to John's view of the
queue for the Q&A.
amatecha - 9 minutes ago
Yeah, I saw (and heard) that as well! Quite funny :) Cool
to see the crowd and everything from his perspective, too.
cabaalis - 4 hours ago
I wanted to see this also. It occurs at about the 1:39 to
1:40 mark.Edit: 1:40:58
callesgg - 4 hours ago
John Carmack is the most natural presenter i have ever seen he just
dumps his thoughts in a clear informative way.Not afraid of
anything.It certainly helps that he thinks about this topic from
dusk till dawn. He has interesting comments and thoughts about
everything the questioners mentions.
ghostbrainalpha - 2 hours ago
John Carmack once wrestled a bear for 6 hours until the bear
tired out and admitted defeat.After the contest, he picked two
bushels of berries and fed them to the bear just to show there
were no hard feelings.They are still friends to this day....
ghostbrainalpha - 41 minutes ago
Edit: Since this bothered some people, you will absolutely
love this...They call me CarmackDaddy, the original G,and I
like to pop n lock it while I'm coding for my rocket and you
just cant stop itHit it!Carmacks back with a brand new
editionThe killa coding wizard, Algorithmic MagicianCheck my
ID, i'm the Keen CommanderThere can only be one, just like the
last HighlanderHittin straight to the kernel, Eliminate the
latencyHit ya where it hertz, Swivel in yo chair aimlesslyI own
all the mobile, releasing shit global?Mack aint playin, you
know what Im serzziziziz Sayin?Srsrszrz Saying..
Jach - 1 hours ago
Sounds likely given the events of
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=X68Mm_kYRjc
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jhawk28 - 4 hours ago
my favorite Facebook comment from the live stream: Artificial
Intelligence does exist. This guy is clearly not human
Animats - 2 hours ago
How much runway does Oculus have left? They're 5 years in.VR
headset unit sales to March, 2017:- Sony: 915,000- HTC: 420,000-
Oculus: 243,000Will Facebook keep pouring money in, or pull the
plug?[1] https://haptic.al/latest-virtual-reality-headset-sales-so-
fa...
yobrien - 2 hours ago
These numbers are as of March 2017, this summer has seen rapid
growth (fuzzy memory but I saw numbers that indicated roughly
double this) due to the major price cuts of the oculus rift (and
also HTC vive to a lesser extent). Adoption appears to be quickly
ramping up
alexashka - 2 hours ago
Those are low numbers for everyone involved.I think this is a
longterm space that Facebook is definitely not interested in
missing out on, so they'll keep it going.How much does it cost
really, in the scheme of things? If anything, I don't know why
Facebook simply doesn't ante up and steal some of the talent away
from the competitors, they have the cash to do it and I'm sure
people would be happy to work under Carmack.
lsmarigo - 2 hours ago
they tried throwing around their weight in the VR game market
by attempting to lock developers into Oculus Exclusive deals in
exchange for a fat facebook check, backfired.
criddell - 2 hours ago
> I don't know why Facebook simply doesn't ante up and steal
some of the talent awayTo what end though? Say they could spend
$10 million and quadruple the resolution, halve the price, and
reduce the barf factor of a Rift v2 in a year. What then?They
would probably be better off funding a bunch of people to try
to find something compelling to do with the current generation
of hardware. It's cool for some types of games, but a market
that's a subset of a subset isn't going to set the world on
fire. It's easy to come up with a cool demo and hard to come up
with a good application.
agmcleod - 1 hours ago
> They would probably be better off funding a bunch of people
to try to find something compelling to do with the current
generation of hardware.As a completely separate peripheral?
Generally speaking most external peripherals sell to niche
markets.
ghostbrainalpha - 2 hours ago
Don't expect them to pull the plug. Zuckerberg recently stated
that he didn't expect VR to be profitable for some time.He also
committed to spending 3 Billion more on VR development over the
10 years!http://markets.businessinsider.com/news/stocks/mark-
zuckerbe...
baby - 29 minutes ago
Sony did that much with PS VR? It's really unfair. I've been
following VR from the beginning.Oculus made it possible, and it's
not working much -> that's unfairHTC Vive has produced the best
headset that made me, and many other, love VR. And they're not
dominating the market, and they're not going to, and VR is not
becoming this huge thing. It's the future really... I feel like
that's unfair.
timdorr - 2 hours ago
First, you didn't count the 5,000,000 Gear VR headsets, which are
co-produced with Oculus.These numbers, if accurate, are prior to
the massive price drops from this summer. There was a huge spike
in sales, with Oculus struggling to keep up supply (it took a few
weeks to actually get my own order).Unless the numbers were an
order of magnitude lower, I doubt Facebook would be pulling the
plug any time soon.
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bronlund - 4 hours ago
Here's the recording:
https://www.facebook.com/oculusvr/videos/1189602884474557