I think a hackable Linux PC in a VR headset is very exciting. But the major problem is the screen resolution is not good enough to make it a viable desktop replacement. It'll work great for gaming or media consumption, but reading smallish text will be difficult at best.
If they made a more expensive version with a better display it would potentially be interesting as a portable workstation/laptop alternative. But I don't think the SoC they're using supports displays much larger than this, so they'd have to upgrade that too. When you have such a wide FoV the number of pixels you need to cover it all at high resolution becomes very large.
xerox intentionally replicated what the typical office desk 'experience' looked like to create the 'the desktop'; this approach either isn't possible or just hasn't been explored by someone with a headset on
maybe we just need to think of work differently to be productive in an enviornment where we sacrificed horizontal and vertical fidelity for a third dimension?
Given the current direction of technology it seems more likely that the need for highly precise and information dense UIs will be reduced, and we will do most of our work by directing agents through language. Where language is not enough we will use custom visualizations and purpose-built UI controls that contain and directly manipulate only the relevant information for the task at hand, constructed on-the-fly. We may not need highly general UIs based on abstractions and metaphors to the physical world anymore.
Why would you want to replace your desktop with this? I keep hearing things like that, but anyone who has tried VR knows that it's just never going to happen. VR's killer app is gaming, and that's it.
In the xreal form factor it is pretty viable. It just needs a bit more resolution, and for more immersive gaming a bit more FOV, what it has FOV wise is fine for screen replacement.
Every single time I use VR, it is a brilliant experience and then a day later I completely forget about it. The object permanence and product stickiness just isn't there yet. It is like the Apple Vision, I only remember it is a thing when it is brought up by someone else.
> - There is still not a lot of great content around VR
I'm sorry but, will there ever be? I've always been on the fence about VR, it looks great for flying/racing/space games, but there has been a lot of time since it seems to have peaked and the only killer app it has is Alyx which came out 6 years ago
The motion sickness in particular is something that's been mostly solved by using non-stick locomotion, like Gorilla Tag (https://store.steampowered.com/app/1533390/Gorilla_Tag/). Both the 'big name' developers and the various flat-to-VR mod makers still insist on stick locomotion, though, even though that actively makes the experience worse.
Funnily, I always found all the anti motion sickness "hacks" (especially teleporting for movement) to be the only things that actually caused motion sickness for me when I started out using VR. "Normal" controller movement was never a problem for me, so it was kind of unexpected that the safe mode was actually harder for me.
I often wonder how common this is. As in, how many people consider motion sickness in VR a problem specifically because they only ever experienced it with these workarounds applied, and then never even found out that actual normal movement (which their brains might be completely used to from years of video games) would have been completely problem free for them.
That's not a solution, that's a workaroud. Gorilla Tag is still a niche game where you're simulating gorillas.
Most games are human-centric, so until we're able to move around using our legs & feet, stick locomotion is still the preferred way to get around in a human-centric simulated environment.
I’m excited. In addition to VR games I’m pretty interested to see how viable it is to do things with the Frame that I’d usually do on a Linux laptop.
I hope the openness of the OS leads to lots of cool 3rd party options. I’d love to see a standalone headset the size of the Bigscreen Beyond 2, and I’d also be much more willing to pay $3000 for a premium VR/AR device that runs Linux than an Apple or Meta device.
If you're good with 1990s era text fidelity, you'll love it. If, on the other hand, you prefer text that's readable enough to not care that it's digital, this will certainly let you down.
Even Apple's Vision Pro is only half-Retina, the same jaggedy text a my 1998 G3 PowerBook. I kid you not, the PPD is identical. And taking off Vision Pro and looking at your iPhone or MBP screen makes you want to smash Vision Pro against the wall. The displays absolutely suck -- and Frame's are even worse.
(If Apple narrowed the FOV down to about 75-80 degrees, they'd get decent text. But 80 degrees isn't deep immersion so we got 100 degrees and terrible text.)
Now the only problem is I'm not sure if I really have another $1059 worth of playing VR golf and rhythm games in me. Cool hardware though & even cooler software.
It's actually kind of nostalgic to see off the shelf computers have such a sky high price again. Back in the Silicon Graphics days the prices were aspirational! Give me something to lust over again... makes me feel young.
AMD and Intel would be HAPPY to replace them, and plenty capable.
Game consoles like PS5 have been AMD for a few generations.
Steamdeck/Steam Machine are AMD.
But really, Nvidia has no reason to leave gaming behind. They can just start dialing back their ambition on the gaming side and providing GPUs that aren't too useful for inference or training. All gaming needs is stability so that devs can aim for something. Games looked great 20 years ago and they'll look great 20 years from now, as long as developers know what they are building for.
Generally, you get a lot of skepticism when you see an article about high schooler or teenager inventing or discovering something. This is not completely invalid because there have been lots of cases in the past where things like this are just fluff pieces and not actually real breakthroughs, more of a feel good thing. Add onto that that she’s a girl and Mexican and you get even more detractors of the shiftier variety.
I've seen a number of "child invents thing" news stories where the supposed invention was entirely bogus. For example, one widely circulated story in the late 2000s involved a young student in Nepal inventing a solar cell made out of human hair. Their supposed invention made no technical sense, and no one was able to replicate their results.
I sure hope humans are in the loop at those companies, reviewing pics that aren't recognized as faces. If I ever see one of those captchas, they'll get to see some things that no human has ever, or should ever, see.
Love when something decides I'm a bot and the decision is final. (Looking at you, CPU-World -- it even lets me know my IP address has been banned for "abuse", too.)
I like this angle. You also need enough technical ability to know what is now possible. People are very used to being limited by technology and by the limited resources of human implementation. Getting un-used to that is a new form of creativity which should be fostered. This should in turn lead to more ideas being tried, more iteration on those ideas.
It's going to make for a lot of stuff, and a lot lot lot of it will be slop. It might be too exhausting to wade through. So there will be generative creativity to produce that mountain of new stuff, but then there's editorial capacity (taste?) that will be able to choose the meaningful results which should get further resources and development.
This is probably the beginning of the end for Blizzard as an identifiable company. MSFT will just absorb WoW, Overwatch, and Diablo and spin up new internal studios to support them rather than have their feet held to the fire by a union. They did it with Halo. Of course, it produced garbage, but that never stopped Microsoft.
In creative fields, unions can produce great things but only when the people move freely and independently (see SAG, SWG) of the companies. It becomes more project based.
I’d prefer to see a “Video Game Artists Guild” than a Blizzard wide union.
would love to see some sources for this particularly in tech/video-game land that are much less laden with decades-old, corporate-collusive union bosses like there are in auto-manufacturing (the regular anti-union punching bags) :)
It is the central thesis of unions; unions represent workers, not the product. When you do more for workers (ie making it harder to let them go, striking, increasing benefits, etc) this comes at the cost of the product.
But that's just a thought experiment. There's also a mountain of evidence showing unions hurt the product (here's a study on increased recalls with higher union participation: https://dl.acm.org/doi/10.1287/mnsc.2021.4082) and that they hurt innovation (here's a study on innovation, showing a reduction in patent quality https://scholarworks.utrgv.edu/cgi/viewcontent.cgi?article=1...). Unions care about workers at the expense of product, management cares about product at the expense of workers. They are at opposite ends.
in your first cited study, product recalls are an incredibly bad indicator of unions decreasing product quality. if you're trying to minimize labor getting more of the share while preserving existing profit, you reduce overhead elsewhere - ie the quality of material you source, the machinery you purchase, etc. that's a management decision. you could just as easily seek marginally less profit and continue as you were, with your existing vendors, but that's not how management ever works
in your second cited study, the only measurement for 'innovation' is 'quantity of patents.' it has nothing to do with quality and if you know anything about how banal patents tend to be, there's an inverse correlation between quantity of patents and true innovation
a couple easily Googled one-off, low-quality studies doesn't prove a point and neither does a thought experiment. I could just as easily point to the numerous examples of union shops making very specific, artisanal products of stellar quality like union-made Red Wings
> if you're trying to minimize labor getting more of the share while preserving existing profit, you reduce overhead elsewhere
This is my point, rephrased. Unions argue for workers, thus hurt the overall product. If a union holds a strike, the money has to come from somewhere, so it comes from either innovation/research or from the existing product.
I gave you two good studies and the overarching logic, I'm not sure what other evidence I can provide. I implore you though to consider the fact unions, and in particular private unions, simply don't work. This isn't a matter of management vs non-management, it's a question of whether they do or don't work, and the evidence suggests they don't work. The exception to this is sufficiently short-term studies, which hide the fact people lose their livelihoods to unions all the time.
you're just moving the goalposts. I asked for evidence that unions are responsible to quality decreasing and then you provided two very limited, inherently flawed studies (one of which doesn't address quality at all). meanwhile, there are countless examples of union-made goods that are of very high-quality and better than industry-average
also, it is about management (ie shareholder short-turn returns thinking) vs labor. better trained, higher paid workers are shown to be better, more productive workers - the research on this is broad, expansive, and unequivocal:
>We assess the effect of the minimum wage on worker productivity among more than 40,000 salespeople whose pay is partly based on performance and who are employed by a large US retailer that operates more than 2,000 stores. Using a border-discontinuity research design, we document that workers become more productive after a minimum wage increase, and this effect is stronger among workers whose pay is more often supported by the minimum wage
unions are a system by which better pay, benefits, training, and safety protocols are enforced. I'm sure you yourself hold the deeply embedded logic that goods made in developed nation states where QoL is high and so is pay are inherently better than goods made in sweat shops and places with rampant worker abuse
it's not a difficult calculus that drives that. if you treat people better, they'll do a better job. if you treat them like shit, they'll do a worse job, intentionally and just from accumulated stress
that said, if you're the one making the decision to fuck up your product quality because you want to squeeze out another million in margins for your board/shareholders/etc, the fault and blame lies with the decision-maker, not the enforcement vehicle for basic labor rights. that's what happened with the auto-industry - they were handily outcompeted by unionized Japanese manufacturing that focused on reliability and gas mileage while GM and Ford MBA-brained big wigs kept wanting bigger, shittier cars, pursuing the same tactic that we see with all of our large appliances these days with artificially reduced operating lives meant to increase consumer spending on new cars
blaming the failures on unions is an escape hatch for corporate responsibility. buying into that narrative is keenly anti-populist, too
it's not like the logic of economics needs to be a dismal race to the bottom - you have everything from Costco to even Quik Trip that prove the counterpoint
Yet UPS still delivers packages better than FedEx.
The most reliable cars are made by Toyota, Subaru, and Honda in that order. Subaru is unionized. Toyota and Honda are not in the US, but have some union membership among employees in Japan. The two also acknowledge every UAW contract and adjust their pay and benefits at US plants after pretty much every new one is ratified.
Do you own a watch that's higher quality than Rolex? Guess who's unionized.
Would you say Walmart is high quality than Costco? Costco's the one that's unionized.
There's a (in my opinion) very weird tendency to think that workers are a hindrance to the product, that anything that gets made is made in spite of the people making it, rather than thanks to them. I think it's very destructive.
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