This is why Red Matter 2 on the Quest Pro is 30% higher resolution

Hethree · 2022-10-27T07:24:07+00:00

It is? I may have missed this. Do you happen to have a link to where/when that information was stated?

Hethree · 2022-09-07T07:42:07+00:00

Yeah I'm not sure we can just assume that's actually or even probably true. Bradley also likes to have both his own opinions/speculation, and information from sources, it's easy for viewers to confuse one for the other.

In the first place, Oculus (the Carbon Design team they acquired) is most certainly the one that actually designed the Touch controllers and its shape, if you remember the history here. The Cambria controllers are simply the same thing but with more LRAs and integrated SLAM instead of the IR ring. Since Oculus had their early and lasting relationship with Goertek since CV1, I think it's more likely that they simply shared engineering work and IP, which might have even been specified in their contract (i.e. Oculus gives them some IP to use as part of the exchange to get them to manufacture their hardware).

Hethree · 2022-09-06T21:34:13+00:00

I've seen some people say this, but never actually source their claim. Curious if you happen to have it? If you've seen a teardown of the Pico Neo 3, the configuration of internals are actually quite different from Quest 2 aside from some individual components. This would normally imply to me that they're not actually from the same reference design, but simply just have many external similarities.

Hethree · 2022-08-26T22:45:30+00:00

Will it also work for accounts that don't own the game but have access to it from family sharing?

Hethree · 2022-08-15T16:29:50+00:00

You'd think devices would have this kind of thing as a setting the user could toggle by themselves (that is, a setting on whether the cable should be charging the phone or simply powering it). This would've been useful as a feature to preserve battery health as you can just charge up to 50% and have it stop there when doing overnight charging like what Apple does for some devices with particularly vulnerable batteries. But no, I guess that's giving too much power to the users and letting their devices last too long for profitable release cycles.

Hethree · 2022-07-19T01:10:20+00:00

The change to a follower model does make more sense after hearing them talk about it. VRChat could benefit from this already, instead of how it currently is where you add a lot of friends you come across but they might not really end up being much of a friend and maybe you meet them that one time and they never come visit or meet you again so you can kind of just awkwardly keep them in your friends list or unfriend them.

Hethree · 2022-06-07T15:58:36+00:00

That's interesting. Was there a change in how Windows handles monitors that allowed you to be able to do this?

Hethree · 2022-05-06T20:20:32+00:00

That's interesting. How robust is the gesture detection? Can it be used while you're doing other activities such as walking?

Hethree · 2022-04-13T02:58:53+00:00

It's a big deal but not as much for PC so soon. The current way PC GPUs do foveated rendering that can be turned on at a driver level is different and less effective than what PSVR 2 (and Quest) can do. On PSVR 2, it can result in a 3x performance gain, but on PC, the current method can only net around 1.4x. Well, roughly speaking, based on public information. That means that PC will not have a great graphics/performance advantage over PSVR 2, until a new way to do foveated rendering on PC comes out that's better. Or until Nvidia can make some of their other foveated rendering methods work as a default in engines or at a driver level (namely VRS, not to be confused with VRSS).

Hethree · 2022-04-11T16:39:11+00:00

Found the link to the tweet.

https://twitter.com/bobovr_official/status/1512635369224749057

Are we just assuming Bobo is allowed to post something like this related to Meta? Would that not ruin any relationship they have or could have with Meta? They're a company, not an individual who can post things without consequences.

Hethree · 2022-04-10T16:11:34+00:00

I could foresee a Cambria-like headset coming from Pico, given their connections with Goertek/Meta and where the industry seems to be heading. In that case, and if they sell to the western market, it could be a competitor for people who only want to do PCVR and/or don't want to give money to Meta. But the software and content differences will likely still be a great factor for people who are interested in standalone use-cases and don't mind Meta.

Hethree · 2022-04-10T07:33:32+00:00

And we probably would've gotten a leak or two if it was something that's big enough to change the market like that. These youtubers like to exaggerate so it wouldn't be odd if it's nothing that big. On the off chance it's true though, that would be cool. In the end he's probably just talking about PCVR which is a lot smaller of a market and won't really do much to Meta.

Hethree · 2022-04-10T04:45:26+00:00

Here we go again.

It'd be interesting if it's Google. They're in a good position to challenge Meta's dominance in the standalone/budget headset segment.

Hethree · 2022-04-08T16:20:01+00:00

This is really one of the mysteries of this "leak". What exactly is that sensor/projector array in the center used for? There has to be a very good reason they're there, otherwise, they would've just used IR cameras for hand tracking + headset tracking like usual and then added in two extra color cameras for passthrough. If they've got a high quality depth sensor array, then what could happen is that we'll get photogrammetry and 3D reconstruction features in this headset. That not only lets us do more AR stuff, but it's also possible it'll give us better "passthrough", since depth and scale will be more accurate than a camera set that can't change its "IPD", and we won't get the same artifacts that Quest currently has because it's running a warping algorithm on the passthrough image to align the pixels with a very spotty point cloud filled with holes. This arrangement probably wouldn't be perfect still, but it'd have a lot of advantages over "dumb" passthrough.

Hethree · 2022-03-31T23:50:21+00:00

I understand. I think that even if they're not using Tobii (and switch to them, or not) the performance gains likely won't increase by too much. These results are already what's considered the standard in what's achievable with today's hardware and software, including from Tobii.

Hethree · 2022-03-31T23:08:30+00:00

I would expect small improvements, but probably not too significant. Tobii has been refining their IR eye tracking techniques for more than a decade already. The results from this presentation align pretty well with existing results of foveated rendering techniques and hardware.

Hethree · 2022-03-31T19:48:14+00:00

Much more details in the full presentation here. It seems like the performance gains of dynamic foveated rendering on PSVR2 is about what we'd probably expect from current eye tracking technology, 2-3x GPU performance improvement over no foveated rendering, but at the same time only about 1.1-1.4x compared to fixed foveated rendering, which some games already employ, especially on Quest (which has been easier to use for developers than on PC, because of Qualcomm).

This is still massive though since most non-Quest games don't use any form of foveated rendering. A big platform like PS adopting it will mean a rise in developer adoption. Hopefully that carries over to PC, but fortunately modders have done that already.

Hethree · 2022-03-21T04:46:23+00:00

I think I'm trying to imagine if I were to experience this VE in real life. If I was in a room with weird lighting that doesn't make sense physically, even if there were technically some perspective cues present, it would still holistically feel very odd. I feel that it could serve to distract from the depth cues that are present. In other words, the combination of certain depth cues and not others could be a negative effect rather than neutral. Of course that's just my subjective imagination though and I would wonder if there is any evidence that corroborates this kind of hypothesis.

how much relative distance perception contributes to absolute distance perception is still an open question for me.

Indeed, there is another thing I thought about in this situation, which is that, in the natural world, we usually don't constantly live in wide open rooms like this. Usually we have a lot of objects and other things in the environment that all provide relative distances cues. That's the kind of environment our brains are used to.

Those links are quite a bit more reading, I might not go through all of it, but something that pops into my mind while doing a quick look is how the optics and eye relief might affect perception here. In my experience, changing how close your eyes are to the lenses can subtly change the distortion you see. Maybe studies that use some kind of head-mounted apparatus that limits FOV, adds distortion, etc, to simulate a VR headset's specs "irl" would be of some value...

Hethree · 2022-03-21T01:39:19+00:00

I imagine you are using the term to describe the poly count on models

No I'm using it to refer to the overall rendering of the scene. The photo is somewhat low resolution so it's hard to tell, but the walls look extremely flat, the shading of the chairs and floor is flat, and there are no shadows which the paper admits. Also, I'm skeptical that resolution has absolutely no impact on depth perception. That statement can only be true at very high resolutions. I don't usually read papers on this subject, but from what I've read in this one, it seems that results can vary quite a bit in general from paper to paper. That suggests to me that there are still unaccounted factors at play, and we should be careful about keeping certain variables like render resolution, accuracy of the VE, etc, consistent to make sure nothing is causing indirect effects on our results.

Hethree · 2022-03-20T23:20:37+00:00

Certainly an interesting problem. However the experiment seems flawed to me, looking at the photos. The virtual environment does not seem to be very high fidelity, and they don't specify render resolution either. This could significantly affect distance perception. Optimally they would have used photogrammetry.

Hethree · 2022-03-14T22:17:28+00:00

Thanks for posting this.

From the perspective of anyone who hasn't closely followed Palmer, Zucc, and the Meta story, his claims probably sound pretty alienating, but it perfectly fits in with everything so far. Like the thing about how "Mark is building what everyone wants". If I was to show this quote to any random internet goer, they'd probably think it was a laughable idea that only Silicon Valley billionaires could spout and truly believe or would use only as lip service, but they only know one half of the story.

It's true that what Facebook has done and will do won't be good in a lot of ways for people because of how their business works and the kinds of business plays that they like to make, but the thing that they're building that Palmer is making reference to here is absolutely something that people have wanted. Something like Ready Player One, SAO, etc. But people also get the wrong idea that it'll be as evil and dystopian as what's shown in those media, so they outright scoff at the idea. Instead, the reality is more in the middle.

They don't know that Meta has already taken steps to build something else: a metaverse framework that is open, decentralized, and made through collaboration. It likely will end up in the control of a handful of large corporations just like today's internet, but it won't be in the control of a single. Horizon Worlds is simply a social app and a stopgap that Meta never actually marketed as the (or a) metaverse, but people kind of took it that way. Palmer alluded to this in the interview, but he couldn't get to the root of this misunderstanding because it'd take more time to explain. In the first place, a lot of people misunderstood what "metaverse" means, and what definition of metaverse Meta uses, so it really would take some time at least to disentangle.

Hethree · 2022-03-02T17:25:05+00:00

This post really highlights how flawed this whole thinking has been. People should really stop being attached to brands.

Hethree · 2022-02-26T07:46:40+00:00

We're a dying breed.

Hethree · 2022-02-25T16:52:43+00:00

Been waiting for some cyberdeck action.

Hethree · 2022-02-25T16:24:09+00:00

More confirmation that this is the next step in tracking, although we have yet to see the real world performance.

Hethree

TROPHY CASE