

Gabe Newell talks wearable computers and why consoles should open up - psykotic
http://penny-arcade.com/report/editorial-article/valves-gabe-newell-talks-wearable-computers-rewarding-players-and-whether-w/all

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repsilat
John Carmack's twitter feed has focussed on head-mounted displays quite a bit
as well. Seems like a popular next step if they sort out the problems.
Latency's a big one, especially if you're doing head-tracking or augmented
reality.

I wonder if we'll see an "i-Eye" from Apple in a few years' time.

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psykotic
> Latency's a big one, especially if you're doing head-tracking or augmented
> reality.

From a coworker's Twitter feed:

<https://twitter.com/#!/rygorous/statuses/168173568889327616>

Numbers: E2E latency of key press->VGA signal or keyboard LED toggle: both
~23.3ms. Measured with 100MHz analog oscilloscope+300fps cam.

For that experiment he used a little custom circuit for input (button) and
output (LED) that was wired to the serial port of a computer running Windows.
In addition to the output LED, the button was also directly wired to another
LED so as to get precise measurements of the delay. If you were to have full
end-to-end control of the system and you chose to make it a top property, you
could obviously get much lower latency. But to even get those numbers I
believe he had to use a special driver that granted his test program
privileged access so he could do direct port IO with INB and OUTB rather than
delegate the work to the kernel.

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epaik
I think the big latency issue here isn't so much with analog input delay of
the user as it is the speed of video processing algorithms.

Currently researched augmented reality solutions look great, but they're
plagued by delay that make usability an issue. As processing power becomes
cheaper and faster, it makes sense that we'll eventually be able to achieve
almost-realtime augmented reality. At such a time in the near future, head
mounted displays will definitely become popular.

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psykotic
My point was more that the baseline latency on a modern computer and operating
system, without really doing anything on the application side, is already very
significant--it took simplifying assumptions and a good deal of hacking to get
to that figure of ~23.3 ms. So, yes, latency is a big issue with practical
augmented reality, on several levels of the hardware/software stack. Computer
vision algorithms that rely on temporal coherence can easily introduce many
frames of latency, so even if the per-frame processing time is manageable, the
latency may not be.

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epaik
I agree. The problem of latency definitely exists on more than the software
level. From my anecdotal experience however, the majority of current latency
in augmented reality does seem to lie in the vision processing.

Interestingly, previous research[1] indicates the maximal latency for a mobile
augmented reality device to be fully immersive is 5-10 ms. While I don't think
this target is reachable with modern technology, as you've obviously made
clear, I feel we'll eventually get to a point where it's Good Enough for
practical use.

I can't help but feel excited about what kinds of applications such technology
will yield in the future.

[1]Pasman, W., Schaaf, A. van der, Lagendijk, R. L., & Jansen, F. W. (1999).
Low latency rendering for mobile augmented reality. Proceedings of the ASCI'99
(Heijen, the Netherlands, June 15-17), 372-376.

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ekianjo
Actually if you do want to "feel" the latency at all in most situations, you'd
rather be at 1ms than 10 ms. 10ms still carries a huge lag when you are moving
you head around in several directions. 1 ms brings it way closer to being
real. We need improvements of a number of magnitudes to reach high resolution,
processed graphics and display at 1ms rate to work. We may have some working
prototypes within one decade, with commercial applications 10-15 years from
now. It could go faster than that, but not very likely.

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bane
Related to your point. Microsoft Research and some prototype displays.

[http://www.youtube.com/watch?feature=player_embedded&v=v...](http://www.youtube.com/watch?feature=player_embedded&v=vOvQCPLkPt4)

~~~
ekianjo
Good point, that is exactly what I had in mind when I wrote my comment.

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valgaze
Newell's reactive/empowering mgmt style: "We’re a very flat organization, so
we expect everybody to manage themselves...[employees] need to know when to
broadcast to me when something’s important...We’re optimized for people who
are very experienced and have been working for a long time and don’t really
need someone looking over their shoulder or second-guessing their decisions."

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geoffpado
The flipside is that this is the company that is 4.5 _years_ late in shipping
the conclusion to their flagship franchise.

<https://developer.valvesoftware.com/wiki/Valve_Time>

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throwaway64
late according to who?

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radiac
According to Valve: [http://uk.gamespot.com/news/half-life-2-episode-one-gold-
two...](http://uk.gamespot.com/news/half-life-2-episode-one-gold-two-dated-
three-announced-6151796)

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seclorum
I wish Gabe would get behind the Open Pandora project, fund them for mass
production and help get them out there. It seems like the perfect machine for
their console needs ..

