John Carmack Tech Talk with UMKC-SCE

UMKC School of Science and Engineering · 279.1K views · 2017-05-30 · 1:20:28

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Overview

John Carmack speaks at UMKC's 2017 commencement event about the difficulties of VR, especially end-to-end latency across hardware and software. He covers why latency and buffering matter and how nausea is addressed.

On Hacker News

Recommended whenever latency, buffering or VR comfort comes up, as an accessible account from someone who dealt with it directly.

Recommended by 3 HN people across 3 months · HN mentions 2017–2023

Topics

VR, AR & spatial computing Tech pioneers & interviews

What people said

chubot · 2017-07 · Strong recommendation
If you care about end-to-end latency, I highly recommend this talk by John Carmack: [VIDEO] This talk blew my mind and made me feel like a terrible engineer. He's talking about end-to-end latency in VR, which actually has a commercial motivation because VR products with high latency will make you sick. (this obviously doesn't happen with shells and terminals!) He's talking about the buffering and filtering at every step of the way. And it's not just software -- sensors have their own controllers to do filtering, which requires buffering, before your OS kernel can even SEE the the first byte, let alone user space. On the other side, display devices and audio output devices also do nontrivial processing after you've sent them your data. It's an integrated hardware/software problem and Carmack is great at explaining it! It's a dense, long-ish talk, but worth it.
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Dig1t · 2023-05 · Recommendation
>Also, prolonged use causes nausea in a large percentage of people. There's an excellent video of John Carmack talking about this and how to solve it. This is much less of an issue now. [VIDEO] I agree with you though that there aren't any killer apps for VR/AR yet, and it remains to be seen if there will be any at all.
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waivek · 2017-08 · Recommendation
[VIDEO] I disagree. See the above link for a lecture where he describes the difficulties in VR in a manner that anybody with minimal programming experience can understand.
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Sources

Video by UMKC School of Science and Engineering, played through YouTube.

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