Author Topic: Ready for the Metaverse?  (Read 19172 times)

PonoBill

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Re: Ready for the Metaverse?
« Reply #15 on: January 07, 2022, 06:55:54 PM »
The geek world is going to have a huge collection of these things as the tech and form factor evolves.

I just received a Quest II since I left my original Quest in HR. The II is a bit sharper. and the general software has improved.

Apple needs something new. Making iPhones thinner, faster in ways no user cares about, and adding features to the iWatch is not going to keep the 3 trillion edging ever upwards, though Tim Cook has managed to lock that in with nothing really new to talk about. Which reminds me to kvetch about his unconvincing excitement and awkward gooney bird hand movements. The coaching has taken him as far as it's likely to go--he still looks like an accountant explaining mark to market.
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Re: Ready for the Metaverse?
« Reply #16 on: January 08, 2022, 03:02:27 AM »
That is great Bill.  A few things to check out that have changed since earlier oculus units that aren't immediately apparent.  On the small horizontal menu bar click on the clock itself.  There will be a small eye icon.  Click that to check out the passthrough function.  Your windows, menu's etc will now be superimposed on top of your real world environment.  Granted, the "real world" is grainy and black and white right now, but it takes no imagination to see what is coming next with eight, full color, high res, forward facing cameras (already announced for this year).  There is a new passthrough API now which allows developers to creatively use the passthrough functions.  AR meets VR.  It is really all one thing.  This is all pretty wild because those black and white cameras were not originally intended for passthrough.  They were just going to be for hand motion etc but some smart people got their hands on these and said, hey now.  There is also a setting to allow passthrough by tapping twice on the headset itself.  This enables you to walk freely around in your environment without removing the headset.  Great if you need to take a virtual leak.

Then go to settings Click the clock again and click the gear (settings) in the top right corner.  Find experimental settings.  Here you will want to enable multi tasking, bluetooth device pairing, desk and couch location, etc.  Most of this cool stuff is very recent.  You can check out all of the preset environments as well.

Sidequest is a sideloading app which allows you to load thousands of common programs, environments, and apps including most android apps.  It is easy to set up and use. 

Lastly (or maybe do this first), Download and enroll in the trial for the Supernatural app.   This is a great workout app (Chan and I use it every day).  This is a great showcase for VR at is current level.  The interface is much better than the Meta interface.  In the Meta realm, creative developers are showing Meta the future of their own device. 

I don't know the correct tech analogy for what the status quo devices represent on the coming timeline.  Commodore 64?  It feels that way.

Here is a rendering of what Apple is expected to do.  If the expected specs and functionality are correct, things are about to change.  Regardless, we are heading back to what the 90's were for the internet.  A whole world of opportunity is about to open up again.




« Last Edit: January 10, 2022, 06:01:58 AM by Admin »

LaPerouseBay

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Re: Ready for the Metaverse?
« Reply #17 on: January 12, 2022, 08:14:49 AM »
Hi LPB,
/snip/ Cambria  /snip/ Apple /snip/
I would wait for one of those two.

Thanks Randy, I'm not signed up with Facebook, so the Cambria is out.
The pic of the Apple is tempting, but it has to be tethered to an Iphone, so I can't do that either. 

I'm all in with Google.  Phone, ISP, browser, GSuite and email etc.  Linking all that crap up years ago has saved me countless hours.  Dirt cheap too.   
 
I'm going to stick to the commercial VR stuff.  I'm still working and thrilled at what's coming thru from Autodesk. 

Jeebus, VR in medicine is mind blowing.  That Varjo site is worth looking around in just for the tiny clips on anatomy.  That really cheers me up.  Hugely optimistic as I get into my 60's. 

Kurzweil says we are on track for Turing test by 2030 and the big kahuna in 2045.  Woo hoo!     
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Re: Ready for the Metaverse?
« Reply #18 on: January 12, 2022, 12:15:40 PM »
Hi LPB,

The Apple device (if "leaks" are correct) will be full standalone no phone or Mac required. 

Completely understand avoiding Meta.  It is unclear how high brow the Cambria device will be but I am open to checking it out.  If all they did was improve the optical path that would be pretty good.  They have had two years, though and I imagine it will be impressive.  The Apple device sounds like it is aiming to go very high end with Macbook pro level hardware.  I have high hopes for that one. 


It feels like Kurzweil may be being conservative.  This is coming on fast.

PonoBill

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Re: Ready for the Metaverse?
« Reply #19 on: January 12, 2022, 09:13:21 PM »
AI research has done a hard turn into machine learning, which is potentially more useful but nothing remotely like intelligence. Even genetic algorithms seem like a detour--which is probably fine. I suspect AI will be like fusion, which I really, really hope does not remain 30 years off.
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Re: Ready for the Metaverse?
« Reply #20 on: January 28, 2022, 04:45:24 AM »
This is getting nutty quick.  Meta just rolled out Horizon Venues for their headsets and if you couldn't see the future before, well, it just became crystal clear.  The experience of meeting for virtual events or shared experiences in fully immersive virtual environments sets the mind on fire.  So long, status quo.

It is also wild to see the NFT side of things forming and seeking out its eventual shape.  NFT's make no sense when considered and viewed from the current mode, but in a VR environment, They are logical and manifest.

According to the Financial Times, Meta, the parent company of Facebook and Instagram, is looking at ways to allow its users to create and sell non-fungible tokens (NFTs) on its platforms. The article also cites that NFTs are currently a $40 billion market, with no signs of slowing down anytime soon. Naturally, it makes sense that Meta would want to explore ways to capitalize on this momentum.

The company's Novi Wallet technology would be powering the service, according to insiders. Instagram is exploring ways to display NFTs while Meta is supposedly working on a marketplace. The FT article states that they are 'at an early stage and could yet change' in terms of progress with this project. However, Instagram's CEO Adam Mosseri stated, last December, that the company is 'actively exploring NFTs and how we can make them more accessible to a wider audience.'


https://www.dpreview.com/news/8091020741/meta-is-working-on-letting-users-create-sell-nfts-on-facebook-and-instagram
« Last Edit: January 28, 2022, 04:57:44 AM by Admin »

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Re: Ready for the Metaverse?
« Reply #21 on: October 28, 2022, 07:00:48 AM »
Meta Quest Pro arrived on launch date (25th), and I have been getting to know it since then.  This is really unbelievable technology. 

Passthrough (AR, Augmented Reality, if you please) where virtual elements are imposed over your actual environment has taken a huge step forward. It is now fully functional, with greatly improved clarity and in full color.  Manipulating 3D objects in a real world environment is near magical.  Multiple monitor computing (In am using 5 monitors) with any program is now possible, pleasant, and is now my preference for many types of work.  For web browsing and browser based work it in now my preferred device.  Visual clarity is greatly improved.  Hand recognition and control (use without any hand controllers) and voice control have both  been greatly improved).

Overall, this has exceeded my expectations.  Weaknesses.  Passthrough visuals (the real world elements) though now clearer an in color, still have too much digital noise (see first aprt of video below for example).  The app store is great but there is still to much silly Meta stuff.  It is too hard to separate the good stuff from the junk.  Passthrough mode is amazing but he virtual environments still feel too Meta.  I avoid all of the social and collab stuff that Meta has done.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=iWSDNiDtsHE
This device is super exciting itself and is a huge step forward but it makes me all the more excited for Apple's device which I fully expect to answer all of the above complaints...at a price.
« Last Edit: October 28, 2022, 07:07:41 AM by Admin »

deepmud

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Re: Ready for the Metaverse?
« Reply #22 on: October 29, 2022, 09:44:25 PM »
I'm interested. $1500 isn't that crazy - I used to drop $2500 on a decent laptop for personal use. Now I'm full time working remote - will I need my co-workers to all do this too or can I jump ahead? The virtual whiteboard is very attractive - one thing we miss is the old white board sessions and so fat I haven't gotten a virtual to work as well as the real thing. We even had some hybrid digital whiteboard at our work just before covid changed everything (my employer is "remote first" now - about 70% of us are remote and we are starting to take advantage of talent all over the country vs "you're going to have to move to Alaska") but ..... nothing has really replaced it yet. I have found when to do have a "real" meeting, as someone in from remote, the meetings are not so great - everyone in the actual room at the actual big table is on a single camera - it's tough to tell who is talking, the sound sucks, I can't see their expressions. I'd like us to all go VR like this, but will it work at all if I jump ahead? And the 5 monitors - I use 3 now - 5 sounds great if I can see them and use them well enough.

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Re: Ready for the Metaverse?
« Reply #23 on: October 30, 2022, 03:58:02 AM »
Hi Deep,

Last part first.  If this was just a multi monitor device it would be worth the 1500.00.  What does a single monitor cost?  Keep in mind that the monitors can be any shape or dimension.  They can appear to you as large as a theater screen, or scaled down to iPad size.  They are entirely legible, pleasant and responsive.  You can have huge monitors in an airplane seat, at your desk, or on the can.  Windows or Mac.  You can have it set up to run on multiple computers, so with a click, you can switch from one computer to another.  I am typing this post on it on Chrome (with my physical Apple keyboard and trackpad),  I have Microsoft Word open on another monitor on my right and another chrome browser window on my left with youtube open.  Keep in mind that your actual computer screen (laptop, whatever), can also be viewed with a little head tilt to look under the device.  That is nice.  Yesterday I edited a video using Divinci Resolve.  I had Resolve up in dual screen mode on two virtual monitors and I had Photoshop up on a third virtual monitor.  It worked great and I could use the laptop monitor to check color with a head tilt.

There are currently a few ways to do this.  The video below shows the Meta solution.  It offers 3 monitors and is awesome.  The monitors wrap around and can be selected with a click to bring any monitor to the center.  Tech support told me that an update will bring an option to have full surround of monitors that can be advanced in this way.  Pretty trippy.

The previously posted video is a free solution offered by a 3rd party developer named Immersed.  It offers more monitors right now (5) but long term the Meta solution will likely be the best. You can, of course, use both.

So far we have been talking about viewing content from another computer.  That is cool because not all apps are currently available on the headset itself, but many are.  Sataya Nadela (Microsoft CEO) announced that Microsoft Teams and the full Microsoft "Office" Suite (Word, Excel, Outlook, etc) will be available as native Quest Pro apps at the beginning of 2023.  The Quest already has an excellent version of Chrome browser, Adobe Acrobat, etc.  So for many tasks the headset is a standalone multi monitor computer and that is accelerating quickly now.

Audio is now excellent.  I haven't plugged any external audio (headphones or buds) and I likely never will.  It is super clear and they have made it very private. The mics are also great now.  The pick up my voice even with substantial external noise (loud TV, grandkids, etc) so dictation and meetings are very reliable.

Horizon workrooms is the name of the Meta app that Marques is using below for multi monitor.  This is is also their meetings app.  You can open a workroom, bring in your monitors as below, share them with others at a common meeting table in a workroom.  There are many table choices and room choices.  All virtual users can share their monitors to a common screen and everyone can use a virtual whiteboard.  Non VR uses can connect as a flat image and others can join as a voice call only through dial in.  Microsoft has also said that they integrating Teams into Meta Workrooms in early 2023 which should be awesome.

The now available programs that allow you to create, manipulate, and collaborate live on 3D virtual objects in your actual environment are mind boggling an thrilling.  For product development this is outstanding.  Defining holes or windows in your real world environment that pass through seamlessly into virtual elements is staggering.   

I still would want to see what Apple does if you are considering equipping a larger team with devices.  We are going to equip our full staff with these this year and we are waiting because Apple is really poised to do this exceptionally well, and they cannot miss on this one.  This is the next shakeup that will determine who holds the cards for advertising, devices, software, and yeah, data.  Everyone is going to be part of this.  Everyone.  They just don't know it yet, or even understand what it is. 

https://youtu.be/jUIE2l_9ig8

« Last Edit: October 30, 2022, 05:21:14 AM by Admin »

PonoBill

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Re: Ready for the Metaverse?
« Reply #24 on: October 30, 2022, 09:35:56 AM »
Thanks for the demo yesterday, I'm extremely tempted to get the meta stuff even though I can see how changing the video screens from LCD to OLED will be a big deal. I have an OLED screen that's .95 inches diagonally with 125X125 pixels. And it's an old (probably two years) piece of shit compared to what apple can do. looking at the iWatch Ultra display, which is 410 by 502 pixels with an 1185 sq mm display tells me Apple can blow the meta resolution out of the water. If the manufacturers take advantage of the nature of human vision which is only high resolution in a small area and low res/modeled in memory for everything outside that high res area the virtual display can appear to be ultra high res with minimal or no aliasing at the edges which the meta eyepiece clearly suffers from. The headset knows where you are looking and can adjust the resolution to suit. As much as I was blown away by the progress I think working with the meta headset would drive me bonkers, but maybe not. I started off in this entire digital universe working on an Osborne 1 computer with a 5" monochrome display with 52 X 24 character display with no bitmap capabilities. At the time it seemed like unbelievable power in a tiny format. Now it would be hard to express how weenie it was compared to my iPhone, my watch, my car, or any of the 5-buck esp32 modules I use in quantity.

I hate to say it, but Zuck is right and his activist investors demanding that he slow progress are dumber than a bag of hammers. They'd probably tell Elon Musk he needs to stick with small rockets and stop building gigafactories. Anyone who listens to what wall street and finance experts tell them deserves what happens to them. I know that firsthand (sadly).
« Last Edit: October 30, 2022, 09:54:15 AM by PonoBill »
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Re: Ready for the Metaverse?
« Reply #25 on: October 31, 2022, 04:28:16 AM »
They are calling that selective high resolution by eye position "Foveated Rendering".  It is in use even on the older Quest 2 to a smaller degree where they are reducing quality to outside pixels using head position and AI to determine your eye focus etc.  They had intended to use it more at launch on the Quest Pro now that real eye tracking is present but they found that with the lens and display upgrades that the newly achieved clarity made the reduced quality areas much more obvious.  The problem is that these devices have relatively weak GPU's and now they have more image information being processed.  They are working on striking a better balance there have promised a major image processing update in two months.  They have actually been really good at updating the Quest 2 every few weeks and performance on that unit has increased incredibly in two years.  It will be interesting to see Sony's Version of Foveated rendering which has been promised on their Gaming headset release coming in early 2023.  That will be a wired device so they will be able to offload the GPU tasks to a less constrained GPU.  Apple is rumored to be using their full Desktop M1 or M2 SOC's which have amazing GPU processing onboard.  Like you mentioned, they will also be using higher res OLED panels and additional peripheral vision panels.  It will be wild to see what they can achieve.  How they are going to negotiate power and heat in such a small space is a mystery to me but Apple does bring the magic. 

It still blows my mind that all of this Quest Pro stuff is being achieved on a Snapdragon SOC.

Search YouTube for John Carmack VR,  He has been core to all of these developments and has risen to a point where he speaks freely about the new devices.  He is highly critical in places of some of the choices that get made for final products, etc, but it is beyond interesting if you want to geek out.
« Last Edit: October 31, 2022, 04:42:18 AM by Admin »

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Re: Ready for the Metaverse?
« Reply #26 on: November 04, 2022, 08:53:48 AM »
My grandson Carson and I are learning Gravity Sketch together.  Incredible.  Now you can also work over your real world environment and collaborate in real time (switching off model control) between users in any location.  So freaking cool!

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vrjk6TEC-Zo

PonoBill

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Re: Ready for the Metaverse?
« Reply #27 on: November 04, 2022, 11:40:01 AM »
I'm familiar with John Carmack, if only for Doom and Quake but I know he's also CTO of Oculus. Or is it CEO? Anyway, the model building stuff is insanely cool, though I have yet to find any alternative to designing things on a computer in 2D. I even bought the big iPad pro with an apple pencil to attempt a looser approach to design than parametric CAD. Didn't work, though in part that's because I keep losing the pencil.

I've been trying to restrain myself and wait for Apple, but fuck that, I'm jumping in. The ante is about what I just spent on a new wing. You've given me a serious case of FOMO. We can't be having that.
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Re: Ready for the Metaverse?
« Reply #28 on: November 05, 2022, 03:54:56 AM »
Ooh!  We can collab on a Mug or a bowl :). In seriousness, the video tutorial series within the modeling environment is awesome.  It will get you up and running at a basic level pretty quickly.  There is amazing video with industrial designers who are super skilled as well.  So cool to watch them conjure products.  The interface alone will blow your mind.  These programs allow you to view and conceptualize in a way that is simply not possible with 2D representations of 3D elements.

The collab feature is incredible on this. 

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=nc0L_54SiNk

I think I am going to lose you to Nanome, though.  It is a collaborative molecular design program.  I only have an hour into that one but it is freaking shocking. 

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=beYyi0p0L5Y

These videos are from before the Quest Pro, so with passthrough enabled all of these objects appear in your actual environment.  Is is bizarre.
« Last Edit: November 05, 2022, 04:03:30 AM by Admin »

PonoBill

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Re: Ready for the Metaverse?
« Reply #29 on: November 05, 2022, 09:05:02 AM »
Okay, that did it. I've been reading a lot of books on genetics and biochemistry. Protein folding and other aspects are almost impossible to understand without 3D models. This will be good for my next career in biotechnology. I might be starting a little late, but better late than never. I really do need to live to 130 to get all my shit done.
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