
John Carmack reviews VR app “Just Relax” - tsemple
https://www.facebook.com/permalink.php?story_fbid=1950702748497566&id=100006735798590
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dingo_bat
The Oculus Home app (GearVR/S7 edge) recently received an update that has
literally blown everything out of the water in terms of quality. I simply
don't feel like launching an app now, just want to look at the scenery. I
didn't see anything about it on HN, so here are a couple of links about the
update:

[https://www.vrfocus.com/2017/03/carmack-on-oculus-home-
updat...](https://www.vrfocus.com/2017/03/carmack-on-oculus-home-update-this-
is-much-more-than-just-a-rewrite/)

[https://uploadvr.com/new-john-carmack-software-doubles-
oculu...](https://uploadvr.com/new-john-carmack-software-doubles-oculus-home-
resolution-gear-vr/)

~~~
dmix
> Static images with mip maps or proper prefiltering can go up to around 18
> pixels per degree if you really want the most detail in the center.

I'm not very familiar with VR. What does he mean here by "center"?

~~~
meheleventyone
Mobile VR works by rendering both eyes to the screen. The result is then seen
through lenses. As a result pixel density is highest in the center of each
eye. So in this case center means the portion of the screen under the midpoint
of each lens.

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bertman
The title made me expect a well-worded post about the current state state of
VR by Carmack. Maybe change the title?

~~~
mrieck
"John Carmack critiques your VR bullshit he could code in 2 hours using less
memory"

[https://twitter.com/SuperAnimoGIF/status/853641374419341313](https://twitter.com/SuperAnimoGIF/status/853641374419341313)

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Animats
If you like forest scenes, there's Speedtree.[1] Speedtree is a commercial
terrain and vegetation generator for games. It can procedurally generate huge
landscapes in real time, and has level of detail handling so the world will
fit in memory. There are some Speedtree demos where you can walk around in a
forest. It's like a game with good visuals, except nothing happens. Very
peaceful.

[1]
[https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=f9Z142aOsm4](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=f9Z142aOsm4)

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eklavya
Did I miss something? Should you give someone feedback on a public post?
Writing generically about something you noticed would be fine but to
specifically talk about a project, I don't know, I would feel super
uncomfortable if it was done to me.

~~~
cma
It is a series of public feedback posts; the devs know it will be public. It
is supposed to be able to help other people.

~~~
eklavya
Ok, didn't know that. It's upto him how he wants to do it. But really a
generic post without naming anyone would also get the point across, just my
opinion.

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dmix
Here's what the game looks like:
[https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Vfz6_V5Ldyw](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Vfz6_V5Ldyw)

I could see this being a great product when combined with those guide
meditation apps. Like [https://www.headspace.com](https://www.headspace.com)

I remember one of these meditation tapes I found on PirateBay which combine
binaural beats and guided meditation. It had you climbing a lush mountain,
coming upon an old looking door in the side of the mountain, and being in this
relaxing room with pillows on the ground and you look up and see stars. That
was my first exposure to meditation and it surprisingly put me in a very
hypnotic/meditative state after the 30 minutes was over. Very good state to
get in before starting creative design work. It would be a great experience to
translate to VR with 3d sound.

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Animats
I mentioned Speedtree previously, and that gave me an idea. There's High
Fidelity, which is a big, empty open source VR world, sort of like Second Life
with few users but better resolution. High Fidelity starts with an empty world
of a huge flat plane. Users are supposed to fill it up. Right now, it's very
empty.

It should be initialized to be more like the real world. The terrain comes up
as unexplored wilderness, with hills, mountains, valleys, lakes, trees,
deserts, and vegetation. If you own land (which is a server-side thing), you
can build it and clear it.

It would be a nice touch if moving around wore paths, so that paths and roads
appeared naturally.

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AndrewKemendo
He makes the point about UE having default large packages. Not a huge problem
for desktop VR apps for vive and rift, but is a limiting factor.

This is however a major problem for mobile, using both unity and UE and I know
it is preventing more mobile VR and AR apps from being developed. Given that
carmack is really focused on mobile I'd think oculus would want to create a
light weight development/graphics engine.

I'm wondering why oculus hasn't made one especially since they have the skills
and capability. Maybe I missed it and they have one.

~~~
vvanders
Building an engine takes years and a large(~30+) team if you want to match
UE4/Unity in terms of productivity.

~~~
AndrewKemendo
I'm very familiar with what it takes. We built a mobile AR engine based on
OpenGL starting back in 2013 that launched in 2015.

I'm sure FB has more than enough fantastic personnel and resources to build a
great engine.

~~~
greggman
Sure you made an engine, I doubt it has 1/50th of the real feature of the top
engines. Can it import layers for photoshop or do you have to save as .PNGs.
Can you import Maya, 3DS Max, Blender, and others or only some exported format
like Collada. Do you have support for Right to Left text, All of Unicode? Do
you run on 15 platforms including things 3DS, Switch, ... Do you have an IDE
non-programmers can use? Does it have undo? Is it localized into other
languages? Does it have a plugin system? Can those plugins be loaded and
unloaded while it's running to do you have to exit, recompile, and restart to
use plugins. Do you have shader editors? Animation Edtiors? Can you apply
different animations to portions of a character? Do you have physics? How
about phyiscally based animations?

I'm sure you're going to tell me "yes" to all of those but sorry, as someone
who's made several engines myself NES, Amiga, 3D0, DOS, Windows, PS1, PS2,
PS3/XBOX 360, I know from experience that just "making an engine" is like 3%
of the real work involved in getting to the level of Unreal and Unity.

It's very easy to "make an engine", it's a lot harder to fill it out with
features and tools.

~~~
AndrewKemendo
Right which is totally out of scope of Facebook's capabilities right?

Give me a break. You can pile up an infinite list of capabilities for any kind
of ide, engine, editor etc... Point is, if anyone can do it its Facebook and
it would be great for the dev community.

Take that chip of your shoulder for a minute.

~~~
greggman
is it beyond facebook's capability? no. Is it beyond their will? Yes.

I was once naive, I joined Google to make a game engine. My belief at the time
was like yours. It's Google, they're a giant company with infinite resources.
There's no way this won't take over the game engine world.

it wasn't until about 14 months in I realized that competing with Unreal and
Unity wasn't just a mater of 30 people building an engine. to actually succeed
it would take more like 300-400 people and a mandate for those people to form
an everlasting division within the company of support. people to make an IDE,
people to continually update the engine and IDE, people to hand hold devs.
people to make 100s of videos. people to run classes. people to organize
conferences. people to organize game jams. people to do bizdev. people to woo
the top devs. people in all the major game dev hubs in the world, people to
localize docs, etc...

this works for unity and unreal because selling their game engine and services
is their core mission. for Google (and for Facebook) all it would ever be is
some open source code of some under featured engine they ship once and forget.
Unity has about 1000 employees. Unreal has at least 250. Their entire missions
are to make, sell, and promote those game engines. That will never be
facebook's mission which is why it would never succeed.

~~~
AndrewKemendo
All of what you say is totally reasonable and I don't disagree with any of the
thrust. That said, I'm arguing that it's in Facebook's best interest to build
the engine and further I think it would make it drastically easier for the dev
community if something like it existed.

I talked with the Unity founders at GDC and they have very little interest in
putting resources around mobile right now , so I think there is a hole in the
market that will be really hard to fill by another startup. Hence, why I think
these platform owners would be best to tackle it.

As an aside, I think it would be more optimal if there were a third party
focused on a mobile VR engine - but again, as we agree it's such a huge
project, with really difficult distribution pathways, that I think it's too
big of a mountain right now for an independent group. So we're gonna be
waiting around a while for that.

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Kenji
_I tried to take a frame snapshot with Snapdragon Profiler to be able to make
specific comments, but that didn’t work because the app doesn’t have the
INTERNET permission listed in the manifest, which is required to communicate
with the profiler._

Now that's a problem I would have never even imagined being possible.

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Animats
It looks like Illusion's _Sexy Beach_ , only without the sex.

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davesque
I expected this to be an insightful post by Carmack about the current trends
and concerns in the VR industry. It turned out to be what sounds like an
entirely predictable review that could have been written by anyone with a bit
of technical knowledge of a poorly designed VR app. Not very interesting.
Don't really understand why this is getting so much attention.

~~~
stagger87
I think it is awesome Carmack takes the time to do this. He clearly cares
about VR and the experience users have with VR, even on seemingly trivial apps
such as this one. I imagine most developers in this space would love to be
peer reviewed by Carmack. Some of his comments seem to be nuanced rendering
suggestions, I'm not sure anyone with a 'bit of technical knowledge' could
provide this level of feedback.

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TheDrizzle43
It would be nice if Facebook's register an account pop-up didn't occupy 1/4 of
the screen.

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philipov
You can use uBlock Origin to hide the pop-up frame. You won't be able to click
through it, but it won't interfere with reading.

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trome
You shouldn't have to, Facebook is a poor medium esp. in the context of HN as
it is a pain to browse/use on purpose if you don't make an account.

