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Search - "virtual reality"
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1. Ability to freeze time... (except for internet & computer speed). Too many ideas, not enough hours in a day. Sleep should be declared optional as well.
2. Ability to not eat/drink at all, or eat/drink in copious quantities without negative effects. I enjoy a cognac, pizza & chocolate binge more than nausea, upwards BMI creep and hangovers.
3. True Virtual Reality. None of this headset crap, but immersiveness rivaling reality itself, with voice-controlled AI-assisted interfaces to "program" anything by simply describing it, iterating over details to add increasing complexities. Not even for porn reasons... my head just overflows with creative ideas for "holonovels" and interactive worldbuilding, but I don't have the patience nor artistic skills for game development.4 -
Started using windows mixed reality for part of my work day, best part, using Cortana voice activation to do things in my virtual space, worst part, every time i say 'hey Cortana,' my google home makes a snide remark.
Fucking google5 -
Ah.... the wonders of technolgy....
Linux fanboys and girls rejoice!
The Linux Virtual Reality Desktop is here. Meet Safespaces. Develop without the limitations and agony of your too small screens your asshole boss gave you.
https://fossbytes.com/safespaces-fi...1 -
How to get investors wet:
“My latest project utilizes the microservices architecture and is a mobile first, artificially intelligent blockchain making use of quantum computing, serverless architecture and uses coding and algorithms with big data. also devOps, continuous integration, IoT, Cybersecurity and Virtual Reality”
Doesn’t even need to make sense11 -
I see the industry popularizing Machine Learning programs using AI to implement ethical Blockchain as a Javascript framework using Scrum techniques for Big Data Web2.0 in Responsive Virtual Reality for your IoT Growth Hacking operations.3
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Got the cheapest laptop I could find that would run Windows mixed reality.
Installed Linux subsystem for Windows and Ubuntu.
Nothing but giant flying terminal windows across my view of a virtual Seascape.
This is my new home.4 -
You know when you can't sleep and think, I'll just do something simple, but useful, it will only take 10 minutes..
How hard can it be to change a CMOS battery in your laptop in this day and age..
Well...
Looking on the manufacturers website, it looks piss easy according to the diagrams.
Even a YouTube video, it looks easy..
Meanwhile, in reality..
First off, the CMOS battery I carefully ordered arrives, but its the wrong wiring..
Good thing I checked first right !
So..
Soldering iron time, change those wires around a little.
Now, where did I put that solder..
FX [ Considerable time passes finding it... ]
"Ouch!" burnt my finger !
Right, that's done, now to tape those joints up..
FX [ Runs out of tape.. ]
No problem, must be some more somewhere right..
FX [ Time passes after searching house... ]
Probably some in the garage..
Who needs to get fully dressed, just pop out in your Arthur Dent dressing gown in the rain..
You find some, eventually..
So, that's sorted.
Now, lets open up that laptop and swap the battery over !
Mmm... that's odd, the battery is glued in place..
But in the video it isn't !
No problem, I'll just take the case apart a little..
Lets check that YouTube video first though..
28 screws later, and they still haven't taken the part that covers that CMOS battery..
No problem, I'll just watch the entire video, they are bound to cover it at some point, right..
No..
Ok, lets not take the entire thing apart, when all I have to do is insert a sharp knife and cut the glue away between the battery and, that thing its glued to, without damaging the laptop in a tiny gap I can't really see..
Still, its fun feeling around with a sharp pointy knife inside a laptop, isn't it..
The glue is cut, and the old battery comes out !
Hurray !
Mmm.. lets not bother gluing the new battery in, we'll just stuff it roughly in the same area and hope for the best, after all, this is a desktop laptop, it never goes anywhere, so it shouldn't jiggle loose..
Whilst we are here, lets upgrade the memory.
And try and remember how to seat laptop memory correctly..
Boot to BIOS, load defaults, reboot to BIOS, set time, and other really important things, then reboot, and we get to Windows desktop just fine.
Now change the virtual memory settings to static file, do a defrag, and reboot..
Oh I mean, wait ages for a defrag and then reboot..
That's so we can try and get that lovely pagefile all in one chunk..
Obviously, it won't be finished doing that till tomorrow, or the next day..
Oh look, its already the next day and its the afternoon and I'm still in my dressing gown !
Maybe I'll just have a snooze..5 -
After 2 years in a small company as an all around software developer (started with xamarin for Android/iOS, then Unity, then OpenXML, augmented reality, virtual reality and .Net MVC...yeah all that and lots more) I changed to another company and I'm here 1 month and some days. I am super enthusiastic and I like it here!! They're more specific and professional, exactly what I need at the moment.
What is the problem, you might ask?
I was given some projects, I have done most of the work but now an issue arrived. I did almost everything and now we're waiting for some answers needed before closing the projects. And I get bored. I want to work!! I need to continue the streak! Just give me something and I'll make it happen!! I am boreeed!!
What is wrong with me? Am I buggy or something?2 -
My dream project? A full immersion Virtual Reality... Like the NerveGear in Sword Art Online... *-*5
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!rant
Super awesome day today.
1. Got up early to do a risky production deploy and it worked!
2. Three PRs approved before lunch.
3. Got some time to continue learning scala.
4. Coffee and cupcakes with some refugees and discussed work as a software engineer.
5. Tried virtual reality for the first time. Really fun.
6. Helped prepare our goals for this quarter and present them to the department.
7. Department meeting had free local craft beer and pretzels.
8. Went bouldering after work and flashed a 6c.
9. Curled up with my wife watching Netflix.
I really love my life sometimes.5 -
If there's any page on a website that DESPERATELY needs a WebVR interface, it's the Privacy Policy. Imagine navigating in 3D to section 8.2
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So if you google any pet say 'cat' on chrome browser on phone, there is a section to view it in 3d. And within 3d section there is an option to view it as a live virtual pet via Augmented Reality. I literally spent entire morning browsing through all the available animals and showing them to my family 😁1
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The source engine is interesting, because it has reached that stage of life where it's old enough to be remarkable-- in the sense that it could be called 'legacy', a sort of milestone in development practices and thinking, both in software, and design.
That said, a better look at it might be from the lense of *uses today*.
A lot of former source engine (SE) devs are now going to unity or unreal, I don't blame them.
But it's interesting to examine examples of games that haven't.
One such game is the freeware "No More Room In Hell". A couple online play throughs shows a wealth of well designed maps (and an even greater horde of shovelware maps, but hey, you take the good with the bad).
The age of the engine itself shows. Even in games like Left 4 Dead the engine's age can be seen. This, in some respects has been a drag, but also a blessing. Where other games could rely on their effects, shaders, and other tech, modders, map makers, and designers have had to rely on wit and creativity.
Enter "situated environments."
In an age where many people desire to travel, to go places, and have grown up doing the exact OPPOSITE, there is a great desire for variety of locations in games: not merely 'environmental' in the shallow sense of a 'theme' such as 'lava', 'tundra', etc. But in the sense of setting in general.
We want places that are both out of reach and yet familiar. Fire-fights happen in city streets. Apocalypses happen in neighborhoods where the skyline is both broken and at once something we know by sight. Open air markets, grocery stores, neighborhoods, all of these provide the back drops of popular games and series such as COD, Battlefield, The Last of Us, and yes, the example game, NMRIH.
I call this idea of 'familiar but out-of-reach level design', "situated environments", because familiarity with them, but *lack of real life experience* with them, on a day to day basis, allows people's expectations to fill in the gaps.
No one for example would argue the layouts of 7 Days To Die are familiar, but most of us don't spend all day in a junkyard or a high rise hotel.
So they *feel* familiar. Likewise with Skyrim, the villages and towns, both iconic and strange, our expectations formed by cultural inheritance, hollywood films, television shows, stories, childrens books, and yes, other games.
In a way, familiarity-without-real-in-person-experience is a shortcut for designers, one that lets them play with the player's head-space, the players subconscious idea of how a space and setting *should* work, what to *expect* out of the area, how to *operate* within the area. And the more it conforms to expectations, the more surprising an overdesigned element appears to be, rather than immersion breaking. A real life example of this is people's idea of chernobyl. When they discover the amusement park and ferris wheel they're blown away by the juxtaposition of the wasteland that surrounds them and the associations ('nostalgia' as it were) that such a carnival ride carries for many of us. It simultaneously *doesn't belong* and is yet all at once *perfectly situated in the environment*.
It is to say 'surreal', which is adjacent to the idea of *being real*, in terms of our "perception of what is and isn't plausible, if not possible."
This is at the heart of suspension of disbelief, because in essence, virtual worlds are a lie, like fiction, and good fiction violates expectations in order to tell us truths about reality. As part of our ability to differentiate bullshit from reality, there is to say an element in our bullshit detectors (doubtless evolved over many 10's of thousands of years), that is designed to not merely detect what is absurd in our limited experience, but to incorporate absurdity into everyday experience. In that sense part of our rationality is the acceptance of irrational experiences, learning from it, and discovering 'a proper place for each thing' in the "models of the world" we all carry around in our heads. Eventually we normalize the absurd, it becomes the new reality, and what remains unassimilated becomes superstition (real or otherwise), a figment, or an anomaly.
One of the best examples I've encountered is The Last of Us: Left Behind, a good chunk of which is spent in a mall. And they nailed the environment perfectly I would say.
Or for those who don't own a PS4, a more accessible example is a map in NMRIH aptly called "the museum", and few words better do it justice than to go play it yourself--that is, if you really want to know what I mean by a 'situated environment'.
What better way, during this pandemic, to get out of the news cycle and into your own head? Sometimes the best way to escape isn't outside, it's within.3 -
I had expected to see people posting about the Valve Index so I waited a bit because I'm lazy.
Since nobody has posted it, here it is.
A few days ago Valve started the pre-order process for their new VR set. I bought one within 5 minutes of going live. They sold out in 8 minutes on the US store and within 25 minutes in Europe.
Who else has ordered/is gonna order it? Why (not)?7 -
On a conference call for this university-affiliated web app:
Random supervisor: “I think the demo presentation needs some more jazz!”
Another supervisor: “Maybe we can do a virtual reality demo of the site, then!”
What. The. Fuck.1 -
Quite a few years ago (late 90s, early 00s maybe) I remember watching a TV show where they demonstrated what virtual reality might be like. It was all rough polygons, no lighting or texturing etc.
I'd heard about the Oculus Rift and considered trying it. I get motion sickness sometimes from certain 3D games (Deus Ex, Portal, sometimes even Minecraft) so was hesitant. Last week, decided to just get one and see how it went.
Didn't expect it to be as good as it is - compared to what was envisaged ~20 years ago. No motion sickness. Not only was the graphics detail amazing but the responsiveness is insane. In another 20 years time what will there be?
Anyway on dev topic: Now it makes me want to play with a 3D/VR engine. Considering Unreal Engine but not really sure where to start learning. Maybe a book? Though reviews tend to say they go out of date quick, I do prefer a physical book for learning tech stuff.1 -
During my first hackathon I teamed up with some strangers. We decided to create some games by expanding reality with virtual element (sounds mysteriously and maybe even ominously, but it's not). So here we go - one of them started building android app, the second guy started building window app in C++ and the last one of them decided to create something in JavaScript. It was fun, but I wasn't prepared and so much educated, so after some trials that ended poorly, the only thing I did was the wooden construction that was supposed to hold our tablet up so it could shoot photos recursively. I almost died of boredom for the remaining time.
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Testing out VR without your own VR equipment is a pain.
The glasses are not much of a problem, since you can first develop using the google cardboard SDK and test it with your phone.
It's the controllers that are a pain to test. Luckily vrtk made something that simulates the controllers, which can be controlled with the keyboard.
The controls are very uncomfortable, this is not their fault; you can't really emulate movement easily with a keyboard. -
Oddly enough, i have simultaneously been less busy and more productive since working 66% remotely.
I find myself with more time that feels "wasted" or not busy, but my metrics show that I have more production, better results, and far nicer documentation. A bunch of us also sat down and did a bunch of coursework on really putting together a domain script library for one click onboarding of new servers or new client setups. We spun up a bunch of new virtual environments that literally solved headaches that had existed for years that never got dealt with because of too many other tickets.
Some of our web clients freaked out at us because the business is moving away from doing maintenance of legacy web work (small to midsize businesses). But it didn't matter. Rather than respond with a "make them happy," the response was "well, we will get rid of them as clients. We need to focus our energy on the essential service sectors we support."
Hell, we even got an automated test that has been broken apparently since 2018 to work again.
Granted, the incoming workload has slowed down. But it's still interesting to me to see that despite the slowdown, there isn't any concern; its still paying the bills and we are getting rid of technical debt everywhere. Tbh, this has really been a good reality check.1 -
Virtual reality home entertainment gear is humanity's revenge against domestic cats who have purposefully stared on empty spots on the wall for centuries.1
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Friendly reminder for hackathons, a great idea is better than a great app.
I saw amazing creations, from a virtual reality rowing machine to a camera that read a Connect 4 game into a AWS server live.
Yet, the hack that won the popular vote was an app that would tell your friend, through texts, where you were when you're heading over to pick them up.
A simple concept to implement, but a great idea.1 -
!rant
Any hololens or virtual reality / augmented reality developers here?
If so, mind sharing "lessons learned" experiences with VR / AR programming?3 -
Why don't we have a virtual world API? Something that would support concepts as well as physical objects? Something that we could definitely the world in so we could simulate reality?
And if we could connect it to REAL LIFE?2 -
Feature not a bug...
My work laptop has started rebooting almost every night.
It's not clear why, but I sort of think of it as a feature now.
I have an ultra-wide monitor, plus another wide next to that one, and a bunch of virtual desktops.
I often think "ok everything is where it is that's good" but coming in reality with a bazillion things open across all the desktops and screens sometimes when I come back the next day ... it's actually just a lot of mess / overhead to pick up where I was.
Sometimes I think we introduce a lot of complexity to solve a problem and ... actually it's just more complexity if you're not already 8 layers deep.5 -
Every time I am surer that we live in a virtual reality, it has been the change of time, and when compiling the software an error has happened and the bad weather has returned.