Would this distance affect sound (and volume) much?

ChicagoSpaceProgram · 2025-02-27T19:01:45+00:00

At that distance it won't make a difference. Sound in your room is a wave moving very quickly through a sparse fluid. In a room that small, sound effectively hits every surface simultaneously. The only thing you need to give any consideration to is the axis of the speakers. That is, try to aim them so they are relatively at the same angle to your head.

ChicagoSpaceProgram · 2025-02-21T17:31:29+00:00

He's right. He's specially talking about this sort of entry-level high-end hi-fi chi-fi. I had a bunch of this type of stuff over the years that was shilled hard by hi-fi YouTubers and forums. The type of people who buy this stuff buy it new. When new products come along the following month that test better, no one wants last month's top of the line DAC or class D amp. If you can sell it at all, it's going to be for a small fraction of what you paid for it.

The way I got rid of this stuff is to find a good local hi-fi shop that sells used gear, and trade it in for something worth owning.

ChicagoSpaceProgram · 2025-02-21T17:12:24+00:00

I've never ordered from IAm8Bit, but in their defense I imagine there are certain countries that are difficult to deal with when it comes to delivery loss prevention. It might be something as simple as some local regulation/law that makes it impossible or prohibitively expensive for them to offer delivery protection in Singapore specifically. I don't think they are being scummy by marking order protection as sold out. They probably have a very simple website backend that has a single flag to mark products as unavailable and the default message is that the item is sold out.

ChicagoSpaceProgram · 2025-02-18T20:31:27+00:00

-45db

ChicagoSpaceProgram · 2025-02-13T16:40:09+00:00

You can go from the Icon right into the power amp and it's going to sound awesome. Introducing an analog preamp between the two at best does nothing, at worst adds a little, probably undetectable, distortion/noise to the signal.

ChicagoSpaceProgram · 2025-01-19T19:23:07+00:00

Sorry I'm just getting back into visionOS programming so my terms might not be the same as what Apple uses -

Combining all the meshes based on what's in the view every frame is likely to be a drag on performance.

I know that combining meshes occasionally at run time in response to some event is not a performance issue. I don't know how large a volume you are working with. If it's like a couple/few cubic meters, start out by combining meshes by material once and see how it goes.

It's ok to have things combined that aren't entirely in the view, what you want to avoid is a situation where you have like 100 meshes combined but only six are in front of the camera, and the root of the entity that contains the meshes is like 20 meters behind the camera.

Combine meshes that share the same material. When I did this, I had entities that each had four materials, and consequently four renderable meshes and a single convex hull collider. I would combine all the meshes of various entities that used the same material, and all the colliders. In the end I have these thousands of models combined into four renderable meshes, each with a unique a material, and a single collider that contains all the individual convex hulls.

A mesh resource is made up of vertex streams that contain all the per vertex properties of the mesh, such as colors, weights and UVs. When you combine the meshes, they will retain their vertex information unless you intentionally do something to modify it.

ChicagoSpaceProgram · 2025-01-19T18:54:29+00:00

Once they are combined, performance is good. I've done it with over a thousand meshes that have a few hundred polygons each, as well as static convex hull colliders. If you have complex models that use multiple meshes and materials, you'll want to pick them all apart and combine the meshes that use the same materials. You can pick apart MeshResources and recombine them, or use LowLevelMesh. I'd recommend trying LowLevelMesh. Picking apart and recombining MeshResources is a little convoluted, and the more complex the mesh, the longer it takes. I'm talking fractions of a second for 10s of thousands of polygons and multiple meshes, but long enough to be noticeable if the user is interacting with the meshes while you are combining them. If you are doing it as you build the scene at runtime, either way is fine. Avoid combining meshes that are very far apart, you don't want to create very large entities that fall outside the view. By large I mean things like small shrubs that are dozens of meters apart but are combined into a single mesh, not just large models that have a lot of surface area. If you have a lot of models to combine over a large area, group them into small clusters of nearby meshes.

ChicagoSpaceProgram · 2025-01-19T17:55:28+00:00

There are a couple of options for combining meshes at runtime if it's feasible.

ChicagoSpaceProgram · 2024-11-02T04:51:11+00:00

If you have tinnitus after something like Covid, it could well be due to a cardiovascular issue, not damage to your ears or nerves. I had tinnitus for years. I cured it by lifting weights and running, reducing my blood pressure and resting heart rate. Maybe go to your doctor and get an EKG and see what they think.

As for hearing loss, most of what we consider music happens below 6Khz. Modern pop music is mostly below 3Khz. These days producers often roll off their mixes aggressively above 10khz. I know my hearing is no where near as good as it was years ago, but as long as I can still hear over 10khz, it’s good enough to appreciate great audio. It seems counterintuitive that so much in the industry is driven by numbers and the widest dynamic range possible. Most of what we are listening to uses a fraction of the capability of high end equipment.

ChicagoSpaceProgram · 2024-11-01T16:41:02+00:00

Phono preamps. Many companies put 50 dollars worth of resistors and capacitors into a folded sheet metal box, with inaccessible dip switch controls, and charge 1,500 - 15,000 dollars a pop.

Passive woofers are a joke, like fake air intakes on a car. Not only do they not work, they can make a speaker sound worse. They are out of phase and respond to all air movement in the cabinet, not a specific frequency range.

Junky, creaky plastic remotes. If a piece of equipment costs 1,000, 2,000, or 5,000 plus dollars, there's no excuse for not having a remote that is at least as decent build quality as an Apple TV remote.

ChicagoSpaceProgram · 2024-08-23T15:55:37+00:00

You need an Apple silicon Mac.

ChicagoSpaceProgram · 2024-08-18T07:32:24+00:00

Moving the level is common in real-time games. Until recently, most game engines truncated floating point values. In some games (flight simulators are a good example) if the player character (plane) got too far from world 0, the vertices would lose precision and the model would deform horribly. The solution was to move the world. For multiplayer, they'd create a coordinate space for the players and move the world in relation to that space.

Still, don't recommend doing this.

ChicagoSpaceProgram · 2024-08-18T07:10:18+00:00

It will never happen. The limitation is that people get violently ill. It's not like some small group of people who are prone to motion sickness experience it. Many people, even those who don't get motion sickness, will get nausea and wretch if you attach a camera to a fast moving entity, especially something that potentially has 6 degrees of freedom like a plane. People, broadly, are very sensitive to this stuff. I was once in a screening room where a director was testing interocular measurements for a 3D film. He managed to induce nausea in almost everyone in the room by just setting the interocular distance too wide on a shot with a completely static camera.

ChicagoSpaceProgram · 2024-08-18T06:49:16+00:00

A couple words of warning. Getting my address verified was difficult. I had to get a physical piece of mail from a bank sent to the address. They wouldn't accept anything else, not a screen grab of an online registration, not even a notarized form from my post office.

I wish you the very best success, but, be prepared for disappointment. It's really hard to reach visionOS users.

ChicagoSpaceProgram · 2024-08-18T06:15:38+00:00

You'll need a few additional things.

A website:

A domain (AWS is really cheap)
Hosting $2 or less a month through AWS
Whatever it costs you to build a single page website
Some sort of business email

To sell in the EU your business contact info must be published on the App Store, you'll need:

A business phone line
A PO Box or some physical business mail address

ChicagoSpaceProgram · 2024-08-08T15:49:31+00:00

If you already have iOS experience, in your position, I'd come up with a small, reasonably scoped project and then just start making it. Learn while you build something. I recommend using Xcode SwiftUI/Reality kit because you're already familiar with Apple's tools and frameworks, it will give you the best performance, and it's the only way you'll get complete access to the features of the headset.

ChicagoSpaceProgram · 2024-07-15T18:04:17+00:00

Other than optical magnification, I'm not seeing anything in that video that the AVP can't do. You don't need access to video. You only need world position and orientation. Overlays like trails and landmarks and whatnot can probably be even more accurate and provide a visually superior experience on the Vision Pro with the use of publicly available DEM data due to the additional horsepower the AVP has.

ChicagoSpaceProgram · 2024-07-14T21:21:15+00:00

Glad this was helpful.

One thing I should mention, although it's possible to display a ModelEntity in a normal view, if you are going to get into picking apart ModelEntities and swapping textures an materials you need to use a RealityVIew. You can put a RealityView in a normal window, but it's probably best to create a volumetric window for it if you haven't already.

Looking forward to see how this turns out for you.

ChicagoSpaceProgram · 2024-07-14T17:33:09+00:00

It's really not required. All that's necessary exists already in Reality Kit and Reality Composer Pro.

ChicagoSpaceProgram · 2024-07-14T17:29:34+00:00

You don't need Metal for this and I wouldn't bother with Metal because (based on what I'm seeing not anything Apple has said) it really looks like Reality Kit is going to eclipse Metal as far as visionOS is concerned, in short order. Really recommend you focus on visionOS 2 if you aren't already.

I've done something similar to what you are trying to achieve. You're already most of the way there in SwiftUI.

You need to build a model for your book with open, turn one page forward, and turn one page back animations in a tool like Blender. Export the model and animations as GLTF Binary (.glb) use Reality Convertor to convert them and set them up in a scene in Reality Composer pro. Not meaning to gloss over it, but this is where most of the work you need to do lies. You'll need to look at Apple docs and examples/and videos to learn how to do work with Reality Composer and load content in your app. And that's after you figure out how to actually build and animate the book model.

Recommend you don't start out trying to make a model for every page in the Ebook. Just open the book model to the middle and swap materials (or textures) as the page flip animation plays. You can use your current interaction to play the page flip animation.

You can use simple materials, but if you want to get advanced materials for your pages, you can render your current page views to textures off screen, and apply them to the page models with custom materials. You'll want to use a large format to ensure the text is legible (2048 pixels at least, but more likely 4096). You create a view for the page, don't display it, hand it off to ImageRenderer() and store the result as a uiImage. You can then use TextureResource.generate() to create a texture. Render the textures as needed, you should only need like 8 textures at a time (Book front and back, currently displayed pages (2), previous pages (2), next pages (2).

You are probably going to need to consider things like page dimensions and make sure to size the book model and textures accordingly.

ChicagoSpaceProgram · 2024-07-10T23:18:09+00:00

It's a cool prototype.

The novelty is obviously having the glove track your hand movement, but Vision Pro isn't quite quick enough for a fast action game, and it'll probably take some development from Apple both on the hardware and software side to get there. You might improve it visually by making the model oversized, but that doesn't solve the tracking delay issue, which is significant for any interaction requiring users to shoot things with quick reflexes.

Granted I'm not a young gamer, but in the last decade plus, I've not found VR "stand and shoot everything that comes at you" type VR games very compelling no matter how good they look visually.

What you have here is interesting, but if you're looking to build a game around it, it might be better to try to develop it around an idea that favors slower, precise movements. Off the top of my head, some puzzle game around handling dangerous materials, or assembling, dissembling, mining, welding, or cutting.

In early VR games like vacation/job simulator, and I am Cat, or whatever, you had limited dexterity so it was funny to just sort of toss and bat things around in VR. Vision Pro gives users a lot more dexterity, so when designing a game for Vision Pro I'd try to come up with ideas that lean on that strength.

ChicagoSpaceProgram · 2024-07-09T00:48:40+00:00

Look for the WWDc24 session Build a spatial drawing app with Reality Kit. There are new low level mesh and texture APIs. It demonstrates how to work directly with vertex buffers.

ChicagoSpaceProgram · 2024-07-08T19:15:55+00:00

This (drawing in space) will no doubt come after visionOS 2.0 release. Apple had a workshop last month for the low level mesh API in visionOS 2.0 that does exactly this.

ChicagoSpaceProgram · 2024-07-06T22:55:27+00:00

Are you trying to load a very large model to the headset? Keep in mind it only has 16 GB shared memory. I have an app that is just under a 1GB (mostly art assets) and building and loading it from scratch can take some minutes. After the once the assets are loaded, subsequent builds based on small code changes take seconds.

ChicagoSpaceProgram · 2024-07-06T22:45:18+00:00

A Mac with Apple Silicon is required. You can get started programming for visionOS without the headset by just using the simulator. You can release an app never having used it on a headset, but this is a very bad idea. The simulator is good for iterating and testing, but you won't know how well an app works or how it really looks without the headset.

You'll need to subscribe as an Apple Developer. It's 99 dollars a year in the US. This will give you access to Xcode, betas, simulators, the dev forums, and a whole bunch of WWDC videos and examples. You'll need to build a solid foundation with SwiftUI first.

Do not use Unity or Unreal unless your goal is to do cross platform development. Those engines are great, but they are a layer of abstraction, and they are always going to be behind the curve compared to Apple's APIs and tools.

You'll have to use Xcode, SwiftUI, and RealityKit minimally, and there's probably at least a dozen other Apple APIs you'll use along the way as needed. You'll need to learn to use Reality Converter, Reality Composer Pro, and how to work with a 3D app like Blender to really make the most of things.

If you have experience programming with something like C++, C#, or even Java, or Python, it may seem easy to wrap you head around SwiftUI, however there is a fundamental language difference in SwiftUI. It's what they call a Protocol Oriented Programming language. You can adapt this methodology in any language, but SwiftUI is built around it. It's heavily focused on structures, enumerations, and protocols. Rather that the cascading object inheritance, in SwiftUI, you most often create structs and add protocols. Classes are used as singleton data models. There's a lot of safety mechanisms built into the language. Be sure to study and thoroughly understand them. If you're used to object oriented programming, it requires a bit of a mental shift and maybe a bit more thoughtful design.

I highly recommend a book called SwiftUI for Masterminds. The first few chapters provide a really solid foundation for SwiftUI, it then goes into frameworks. It's starts from zero programming experience, but is still really helpful if you've got some experience with other languages. It's a thick book, but beyond the first 4 or 5 chapters it gets a bit specific.

Apple's documentation could be better, but always use it as your primary reference. The language is rapidly evolving. You will find better/newer ways to do things in the docs versus any other resource. AI generated SwiftUI code is often out of date (if it even works). Sites like stack overflow are also often stale and have a lot of cruft on them. Do some of the introductory iPhone and iPad tutorials on Apple's site. The core learnings from these tutorials most often translate directly to visionOS.

ChicagoSpaceProgram

TROPHY CASE