> If you want to find out more about the team’s work on the application of network analysis to the State Papers, see their articles Metadata, Surveillance, and the Tudor State, and A Tale of Two Snowdens: Dataveillance in History
Thomas Cromwell was the most prominent spymaster of Tudor times and letters to him feature heavily here. So not all of it is bulk surveillance, some of it seems to be old-fashioned human intelligence gathering.
It is not a stupid idea. Most companies cannot make too much money from designing/selling the hardware. On the other hand there is money to be made from the data collected from these IoTs and selling device management and updates as a service.
ARM is just not the right company to make that happen. They are fantastic at what they do but not software services, big data, etc
Do we really want every household item squirreling information back to the manufacturer about our personal habits? Exactly who stands to benefit from that? Consumers will lose a fortune and shun the technology.
Of course no one “wants” that. But let’s rewind 20 years ago and ask: “do we really want our telephones squirreling info back to the manufacturer about our personal habits?” Sounds equally absurd.
It's a great idea ... for industrial processes and machines. Unfortunately this is not where the hype is, nor where continual profits are. Industrial customers have a nasty habit (from the seller's perspective) of buying stable stuff that they can run for decades, which tends to rule out planned obsolescence based profits.
There are few to no compelling use cases for consumers creating a true network of internet connected things, because they don't have distributed physical things. If all your stuff is nearby, and isn't in large quantities, then the internet, or computer networking in general, is not the path of least resistance to control/monitor/utilize it to some greater application. Controlling X with your phone is novel at first, but its nearly always an incremental improvement on controlling X with physical interfaces. Its not a killer app by any definition. It's businesses that have lots of stuff in lots of places to track and control. In these scenarios, a microcontroller with a radio is not just an incrementally better solution competing with an existing alternative, but the only feasible solution.
You can do IoT correct and you can do it wrong. Most decide that you need to pull out your phone or register a device before you can use it. No one wants to download and app to be able to operate a juicer. However a coffee machine for example could be extended with optional features not hindering the core functionality.
I contracted for an IoT company that built hardware and software for the manufacturing industry, it was very profitable. I agree that the consumer side “smart toaster” part is garbage though.
Those prices are insane. No way. My Oculus Quest 2 is performing brilliantly for the $300 I paid. In fact had I paid $2000 for the OC2 I would’ve been well satisfied. FB/Meta have put billions into software development and are likely selling the Quest units at a loss to grab marketshare before Apple introduces its take on XR. If Simula want to compete with the FOSS angle they need to get costs down, especially considering that few have expendable income because of Covid and many have been burned by fantastical kickstarters that never deliver, and this is a highly technical project we have no idea if the authors have the experience or qualifications to pull it off.
As you said, you can not compete against Facebook by price. They don't have billions and will NEVER be able to compete on that field.
They need to sustain themselves and do that with something that facebook could not copy.
While OQ is way cheaper, it also forces you into using facebook accounts and you pay with your personal or even worse, with your company information, that is way more valuable than the cost of the simula.
A surveillance device with two cameras and microphone and eye tracking of your workers is something unacceptable for lots of companies.
The price is OK if they manage to offer something that improves productivity and make companies money. Juts a month of paying an engineer is way more than this price.
I don't care if it makes companies money or otherwise benefits them. I want this to be accessible to ALL hackers, on a personal basis, whether they are backed by a corporation or not.
And for that to happen, the cost must go down. Just like the PinePhone is IMO the first practically obtainable phone designed to be hacked, we need something like this for VR. Otherwise we'll just end up with a bunch of Librems that only rich US engineers can enjoy.
Not the same thing at all. Smartphones have reached the point where further improvements are largely superficial for years now. Pinephone's price point is only possible because of over a decade of the proliferation of cheap smartphone components.
Consumer VR headsets are nowhere close to that point. The Quest 2 is right at the edge of usably clear text for work - with a price point that is only possible through the backing of a giant corporation desperately gambling their future on their whole metaverse shtick.
Trying to do better means requiring optics and display technology that is going to drive that price point up, especially for a hackable headset that is automatically going to rule out monetisation through user data.
tldr: nobody should care about providing cheap hardware to entitled "hackers" at their own loss. Hardware doesn't grow on trees.
OK, I agree. Why are you calling me entitled, though? I'm not demanding that the headsets be sold at loss. By "I don't care whether it makes companies money", I meant "I don't care whether it makes more money for the company purchasing them" (because the context of the discussion was that it would be companies purchasing these headsets for their own corporate efficiency reasons). A selling company must obviously make enough money to keep the production line going, how is it sustainable otherwise?
All I am saying is that:
A) certain conditions need to occur for a hackable home headset space to flourish
B) said conditions haven't occurred yet, and will not until the price comes down
I understand your hesitation, but our specs are pretty top end. The headset itself will be comparable to a Varjo Aero in picture quality and there's a relatively beefy integrated, detachable x86 compute pack. And high-quality AR mode that's usually reserved for Varjo's >>5k units.
Will we reach Varjo's level of polish? No way. But I'm confident we can get 80% of the way there at least.
Hey, just an idea - most folks looking at your product probably have some VR experience. Maybe you can provide a comparison with various contemporary headsets, showing why/how yours is better, esp. for working and not just gaming or watching vids?
Like, I'm certain I cannot work in my Index, not for any prolonged time. It's awesome for games, but not for any text-heavy stuff. I've tried a few times, my take is that problem is the resolution is not good enough => I would need giant fonts => turning my head a lot => extra neck strain (as if headset, even with a counterweight not bad enough in this regard) => fatigue and headaches. If I could see a honest (simulated) rendering of what I'd see in an Index vs what I'd see in Simula One, that would be amazing.
Good idea. We have a listing in one of our blog posts, but I'll see if I can do a simulation.
I think the best bet actually would be for me to just take a camera and do a through-the-lenses shot through both. Our current optical train needs a second iteration for the mold, but once it meets our specs we'll do a blog post about it.
I don't particularly disagree with the price point argument but since you're here...
"high-quality AR mode" -- do you have public SDK documentation for this and does it have a mixed passthru VR / AR mode like the Quest 2? The quest actually is a bit underpowered for doing this properly imo so I can see a higher price point potentially being necessary to pack it with the right hardware.
Not that I'll ever build it but somewhere along the line some cordless headset is going to have great passthru and the ability to replace the windows in my house with the beach or a beautiful mountain vista.
Also just an observation -- x86 on your face makes me think it probably gets quite hot :)
No documentation yet, but I can give you an overview.
We have two wide-angle RGB cameras mechanically locked to the users' PD. The cameras itself are around 2k x 2k at 90 fps. For the standalone mode, the data is pushed over a PCIe gen 3x4 link so we can hit <12ms latency. Tethered is a bit more tricky as we can't count on the bandwidth being available, but we'll either compress it or do a reduced resolution.
The actual sensor is still TBD. I'd like to do this properly with a global shutter sensor (IMX547), but they're a bit too expensive. If we don't have the margin for it, something like a IMX715 is the fallback.
The compute pack will be on the back of your head, so a bit easier to cool and not as severely annoying. Also helps balance the headset.
Very impressive product- I certainly applaud your efforts and agree that the price is competitive for what it is. You can even use ultra wide monitors at similar resolutions as a comparison point. (Though of course they end up way ahead in terms of ppd)
Has there been any work in the distro related to 3d UI stuff? Maybe a 3d representation of the file system, for example. Anything related to facilitating shared virtual spaces?
For the future, have you looked into micro LED displays with waveguide optics? It seems like the thing that is going to allow for glasses-style VR/AR.
To me it's a no-brainer to tether that type of display to a phone. Could just use a long cable going to a pocket or hang the phone around the neck etc.
Not yet. It's planned to significantly improve the software, but we only have so much bandwidth right now.
uOLEDs with waveguides (for AR) or pancake lenses (for VR) are... really complicated. Both systems currently do not offer the visual quality that a traditional refractive system can offer due to low light transmission, ghost images, and so on.
The pixel size on a high-res uOLED is so small that getting the same PPD requires pancake optics to fit in the headset form factor. Otherwise your spot size (i.e. the minimum resolution of the optics) is too large and you lose the benefit of a high-res display.
Also, bandwidth is a big concern. Our double 2448x2448@90Hz displays require DSC to run even with a DisplayPort 4-lane HBR3 link. I don't think phones can drive that.
How about comfort? I’ve tried working in the Quest 2 using immersive and while I loved it, it just wasn’t the kind of thing I would do for hours on end.
Are you guys confident that your headset will be more comfortable than the Q2? If so, how much more?
I would think PCVR+workstation would be their main competitor or even Hololens. Microsoft has built a more compelling software suite for productivity thats not also locked into a single platform like Oculus.
Reclining can be a nice way to take a break from weight and pressure on head and face. Which can require modding a headset, to pad a back-of-head knob, etc. And hmd thermals aren't optimized for reclined. But here, perhaps this compute unit might be made detachable?
That i7 compute pack should be the first thing you cut to make an affordable product. If the headset is 2-5k in the current market I think you’ll be very lucky to sell 100, but would love to be proven wrong. Get the costs down, get more funding, sell the units at a loss to build a dev community.
I think you guys are making a mistake I once made, focusing on the hardware design for what is actually a software product. You’re building an Android phone, without Android.
We have a software product--we had it for ages. The hardware doesn't exist for it. That's why we're doing this.
We're not doing this lightly. Hardware design is expensive, and risky, and low margin. But we want a cultural victory, not necessarily a financial one. If that means doing it ourselves, then so we will.
Not a thought through attitude. If it sounds like I’m on your case here it’s because I am. You aren’t even giving this product a chance at success. Expendable income for most is $400/mo. Your headset won’t sell in volume over that, especially with the current competition. But I’ll pick one off ebay when you’re done with the cultural victory?
Here's the thing. Let's say you want to work in VR:
Case 1, you do it like Immersed. Virtual monitors that you can position in space. Great, but that's all you can do. I don't believe this will be a way to drive mass adoption of VR computing.
Case 2, you build a window manager. Each window can be positioned individually and you can give specific windows custom handling, or even integrate 3D scenes. Problem is, now you're limited to Linux. Linux headset support is very limited. People don't have Linux installed, even.
How do you solve this? You build a Linux compatible headset. You minimize the friction. You allow people to put on the headset and get to work. Nobody cares that their Android phone is Linux based, after all.
That being said, right now this absolutely is an enthusiast, early adopter product. We'd like to get the costs down, but going into a costs battle when you're doing a new product type is insanity.
I'm sad about the price too, but you can't just say things like that with a dismissive attitude. They are trying to get an entire way of working off the ground. Think how much time, money and design work it took to go from no Raspberry Pi, to Pi 1, to Pi 3 (which IMO was the first one that was generally usable). They are trying to do the same for productivity VR based on Linux.
I'll be that guy. I thought, you must be new around here and sure enough I'm right.
Respectful discourse is important and we strive for something better than the tone you're carrying here. I say "we" only because I like this little respectful discourse corner of the internet and because the site guidelines are fairly clear on the subject. It's the culmination of hard work, cool, and I too hope it finds a lower price point and ends up succeeding.
I just think your comment just signals ignorance of the industry. They're targeting this headset for people who are looking for a portable vr workstation with an angular resolution high enough to simulate 1080p monitors.
How exactly are they going to achieve the visual specs to achieve that at the price point you're expecting?
They are never going to sell something like this at high volume, not only because the market for it isn't there yet but because this goes beyond the specs of consumer level headsets - which means they wouldn't be able to source the required components to even address such a hypothetical demand.
I’m going to take it to the level above offensive tough love and just give up at this point. If you want a $5k headset to emulate a $100 1080p monitor, with a 3 hour battery life, and switches for every sensor so the secret service can’t see how messy your bedroom is, then this product is for you. Good luck
No need to be an ass. Also, you're quoting the limited edition price which seems to amount to aesthetics and priority shipping.
Elsewhere on this page, you literally said that you would have been happy to have paid 2000 for the quest 2 - which this device would utterly dogpile both in terms of optics and raw power.
Cute though that you feel the need to paint the completely normal aversion to having a corporation having the ability to depth scan your surroundings at all times as tin foil hat territory.
I'd rather you skip the hysterics and just "give up" if you have nothing constructive to say.
Let’s not balk at prices when a newcomer stands up to Big Social. Their true customers are the advertisers, and no honest business can compete with ad-driven “free” products on price. I imagine Facebook already sells Quest at a loss, and making its future equivalent free will surely be a logical move for them to capture eyeballs—but that does not mean competitors must be free, otherwise would imply no competitor ever, apart from those backed by nation-states or shady business models.
For the record, I’m sure I’m far from the only one who 1) never had a VR headset yet, 2) would not buy a Facebook product, and 3) could buy one for US$2k+ for experiments if that means no lock-in. It’s the price of a decent laptop. Weren’t the original Oculus prices in that ballpark, before FB came in with its billions?
It depends on how you work. I have a pretty good company laptop, but it's pretty much just a front-end for an SSH client, a web browser, and a local Windows VM. All my actual work happens on remote machines.
These prices are very competitive. You’re comparing two very different product with different capabilities. It’s like saying a flip phone and a new smartphone are the same because they both can make calls.
Funny I have had very similar experiences. The negative consequences for the work not being done soon compound the procrastination. I can’t say this is a solved problem for me, and I’m not a healthcare professional. But some tricks I’ve learned;
Get proper rest (6+), in a quiet (silent, pitch black) environment.
Modafinil or better Provigil/Artvigil with green tea, in the morning only.
6500K LED lamps.
Change your wallpaper to light/pale green, uniform color.
But the most effective way to get out of this situation is to reset your mind. The simplest way is to get drunk. In California we have edibles, and that’s effective as well. At the extreme you could use shrooms if you can get your hands on them, but be careful to dose exactly based on bodyweight. If you take a serious (not micro) dose while supervised with a friend, it will result the next day in being ‘mixed up’ and when you recover, the procrastination issue will be easier to overcome. If not select a new substance and try again. Hope this is helpful, good luck
