Fool me, this is real good shit ! [the VR thread]

[gilesgoat]

People at Oculus should be kicked in the arse CONSTANTLY ..

So .. "with some exoterisms" I made it work.

What I think it's the point is that "connectivity via USB cable does no longer work".

Now WHY on *MY* PC that "Oculus Quest 2" appears, albeit in an "Unconnected" state, on my PC AND NOT on Yak's PC that's everybody's guess.

Still even on *MY* PC there's no way whatsoever to establish a connection VIA USB CABLE.

However, if you connect to a router via Wifi, select "beta features", and start the "airlink server(?)" on your PC then it's POSSIBLE to connect to it via WiFi.

And surprisingly, once connected it works quite well.

So on Yak's PC .. after separately dowloding the "Android Tools" from Google, attempting a conncetion via ADB, that DOES WORK via USB cable ( and anything else for the matter BUT Oculus Home ), checking the device is seen and such ..

Still no joy to make it appear on the list of "Devices" of Oculus Home.

However, the Airlink connection does work, WITHOUT usb cable ..

SO WTF ???

[edit] - after all this shit "magically" the Quest 2 appeared "on the device list" of Oculus Home, thing that DID NOT want to do at all before !

[gilesgoat]

.. fooking hell .. .. .. ...

.. .. .. ... I cannot count how many VR headsets I have on my desk and I am working with

[Cloudane]

I use Virtual Desktop and it works brilliantly with a nice easy way to launch steamvr as well as Oculus games

Also if vrchat was the Quest client it's not so great, you get mostly placeholder avatars since most are made for PC

[gilesgoat]

I am starting to ask myself "how OLD or how new the Adreno 540 GPU is" ...

I am "desperately looking around the QualComm site" looking for any docs about the Adreno 540 .. .. can't find a thing .. and the only Vulkan/OpenGL/etc. documentation available ( that is something but not much ) is still .. from 2017 .. the "Adreno SDK" is from 2016 ...

After that .. I can't find a shit specific about Snapdragon 835 other than a "brief brochure" telling "usual PR blurb" about how fantastic it is ..

Kinda .. odd ..

I am looking all this because surprise surprise the code made for Quest 1 works "almost 100% on Quest 2" but there has to be some difference in the GPU/stuff "something goes a bit odd" and we are now getting nuts ( me ) to figure out "what is causing this difference".

So much for "standards"

[gilesgoat]

I use Virtual Desktop and it works brilliantly with a nice easy way to launch steamvr as well as Oculus games

Also if vrchat was the Quest client it's not so great, you get mostly placeholder avatars since most are made for PC

Yak had a quick look into a certain thing .. I was thinking "what the heck Cloudane is talking about ? Surely a 3D model is a 3D model ?" ..

In my "naivety" I was thinking "maybe it's just a .obj / blender / some format" model but no, turns out "an avatar" is almost a piece of code made/compiled for Quest/PC using Unity ????

[edit] - also, again, "so much for portability/compatibilty" .. how they can "fuck up" things like those ?? .. one should make "one model for all" ?? Why it's dependent on the HW architecture ??

You mean there's not a "standard 3D model" for "rigged" models ? They haven't invented it yet ?

[Cloudane]

I'm not an expert on all the terminology and how it works but basically...

You start with a rigged FBX with blend shapes etc, all the ones I have seen have been done in Blender

Then this is brought into Unity (2018.4.20f1 specifically) and mixed with the VRC SDK - generally these days the 3.0 version - to create an avatar bundle. Your Unity project would consist of the avatar brought in as humanoid with the necessary bone mapping, throw on the textures and shaders (a lot use Poiyomi toon shader), put it into the scene with suitable scaling, various animation controllers for facial expressions based on gestures, tail wagging, animations to turn things on and off or start animations or whatever. Heck of a learning curve. Then you compile it for Windows (PC) or Android (Quest) and upload the bundle.

For a cross platform avatar you upload for Windows, make a copy of the avatar with mobile shaders and various things removed, make sure it has the same blueprint ID and upload for Android.

The reason for the incompatibilities are twofold
One is that the game was originally made for PC with PC specs... so fancy PC shaders, audio sources, particles, dynamic bones ("jiggle physics"), hundreds of thousands of polys etc. A lot of people just managed to mash in a MikuMikuDance avatar with like a million polys and called it a day. Quest isn't capable of all this - you need max of about 10k polys before it kills people's frames (so any Android avatar above that is hidden by default, and they see a performance block robot instead), mobile shaders, no audio, no particles, no dynamic bones.
The other reason is just the architectural one, you compile the avatar for the platform.

There are other limits on the Quest side, like number of material slots, they prefer an atlased model.

Lots of avatars only have a blueprint ID on the PC side, so they originally fell back to a robot on Quest. Now they fall back to any good performance Quest avatar the user chooses.

[gilesgoat]

"Metaphisical parenthesis"

Yesterday I saw the Nth story of "some company sets up a fantastic Kickstarter for a super mega MMORPG that will allow people to be/do ANYTHING grabs the money does nothing and tries to vanish".

"Nothing that new to see here" except they really managed to gran FUCKLOAD of money.

But what makes really the point here is "that there are certain people that are more than happy to pay anything they can to have a VIRTUAL world where they can be whatever they want to be / do anything they want to do".

And some of them, those that could, paid CONSIDERABLE amount of money for that opportunity.

Now .. I am sure that "for some of those people" what they do "in a virtual world" is "as much real as the real world is" and I am convinced that for them the distinction between "real life" and "virtual life" does not exist and/or is much different than how "we" ( more used to the real life ) perceive.

Which opens the question "is that were the human life is destined to ?" .."will this difference between real and virtual" or let's say "material and digital" vanish and/or get to the point where "there will be more digital than real ?".

Will people end up like in those "dystopian movies" like "Surrogates" for example, living in squallid conditions mostly in some decrepit place in a bed with a drip in their arm feeding them/giving them water spending almost 24/24 7/7 connected to some "mega VR" where they can do "anything they want ?".

( which OK opens the question "what kind of jobs they do to eran money to still get the food they need to be alive" and who's feeding them or shit like that ).

I would be that "for quite some people that could be ok".

Eventually extrapolating to an extreme "could end up with brains in jars connected to a machine" because "you don't really need all the rest" you can simulate and/or have a machine doing it for you.

But that also "with a further extrapolation/reduction to the absolute minimal".. you'd end up with "a brain and a button you click" to say "give me pleasure" and that's it .. what else would you ever need ?

But at that point .. "what's the point of the brain and the button ?" has absolutely NO PURPOSE AT ALL to exist, why to keep it into existence ?

End of the "Metaphisical Parenthesis" ..

Ah yes one question remains .. for me .. "Metaphisical" has an 'i' or a 'y' ???

[Harlequin]

Ah yes one question remains .. for me .. "Metaphisical" has an 'i' or a 'y' ???

'Metaphysical' (as in above physics].

I do not like the idea of fixed destinies. Perhaps anything can happen, and maybe everything does.

Some, such as Jean Baudrillard, might say that we were already mostly living in virtual realities before we even had computer simulations. His Simulacra and Simulation appears to have been the basis for such films as Charlie Kaufman's Synecdoche, New York.

[gilesgoat]

Ah yes one question remains .. for me .. "Metaphisical" has an 'i' or a 'y' ???

'Metaphysical' (as in above physics].

I do not like the idea of fixed destinies. Perhaps anything can happen, and maybe everything does.

Some, such as Jean Baudrillard, might say that we were already mostly living in virtual realities before we even had computer simulations. His Simulacra and Simulation appears to have been the basis for such films as Charlie Kaufman's Synecdoche, New York.

The question is more about "is that what people want ?" and "is that correct/wrong ?" .. because ultimately "the brain with the give me pleasure button" is kinda where that is/goes ?

[edit] - ah yes .. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Brain_stimulation_reward

[Harlequin]

The question is more about "is that what people want ?" and "is that correct/wrong ?" .. because ultimately "the brain with the give me pleasure button" is kinda where that is/goes ?

[edit] - ah yes .. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Brain_stimulation_reward

It would appear evident that at least some people want something like it. As for 'correct' or 'wrong', I can only ask, "For what purpose(s)?"

[Cloudane]

I was thinking very similar the other day, in fact this is a synopsis I wrote for a book I'd never get around to writing:



The year is 2040, and viruses are now a thing of the past. When Covid-22 came to pass and it was apparent that coronaviruses would peck at humanity for as long as it exists in its current state, every society on Earth began to retreat into virtual reality, pouring all the world's resources into rapidly developing the technology to be accessible to all and feel like life itself.

Your bodies safe from physical contact, viruses no longer spread - you live, work, eat, sleep and even reproduce in VR, the physical realm handled by robotics and your physical body safely isolated.

Since 2025, all newborns have been hooked straight into the VR system from birth. It's deemed a blissful life that gave everyone the bodies they wanted, stopped non-recreational wars, removed physical disabilities and allowed you to travel anywhere in an instant.

You and your friend are 15 year old "Novans", the name given to those first VR births. One day when walking around the pyramids of Giza for history class, your friend turns to you and says "I know how to see these in the physical world my dad talked about. Want to try it?"
You nod with all your youthful curiosity and enthusiasm, blissfully unaware of the magnitude of what you are about to uncover...


The idea being to explore the question (through the open, curious and rebellious mind of a teenager seemed to make sense to me, before they get too indoctrinated into the prevailing way of life) of whether the real world would still, in the future, feel sufficiently "real" vs. VR to actually matter. My feeling is "yes, in their eyes reality has so much more to it that the adults have forgotten about" but it's a dystopian future and only groups of rebels exist outside of the shackles of VR (sort of Blake's 7ish) and there would be valid arguments from e.g. people who wouldn't be able to enjoy the real world so much due to physical disabilities.

[gilesgoat]

I was thinking very similar the other day, in fact this is a synopsis I wrote for a book I'd never get around to writing:



The year is 2040, and viruses are now a thing of the past. When Covid-22 came to pass and it was apparent that coronaviruses would peck at humanity for as long as it exists in its current state, every society on Earth began to retreat into virtual reality, pouring all the world's resources into rapidly developing the technology to be accessible to all and feel like life itself.

Your bodies safe from physical contact, viruses no longer spread - you live, work, eat, sleep and even reproduce in VR, the physical realm handled by robotics and your physical body safely isolated.

Since 2025, all newborns have been hooked straight into the VR system from birth. It's deemed a blissful life that gave everyone the bodies they wanted, stopped non-recreational wars, removed physical disabilities and allowed you to travel anywhere in an instant.

You and your friend are 15 year old "Novans", the name given to those first VR births. One day when walking around the pyramids of Giza for history class, your friend turns to you and says "I know how to see these in the physical world my dad talked about. Want to try it?"
You nod with all your youthful curiosity and enthusiasm, blissfully unaware of the magnitude of what you are about to uncover...

Also in all this we should always ask .. "what if the machine malfunctions and we can't fix it any more ?" ...

Or worse .. if we end up in something like this

[Cloudane]

Elaborated post a little but yes, the question of what happens if it all goes wrong would have to be explored as well!

[Cloudane]

A comment I saw (and related to) from someone who was glad that Covid restrictions are finally allowing them to see and hug friends face to face was "Zoom is to a real life meet-up, what a wank is to a good shag"

If so I would place current VR somewhere in the middle. The mutual masturbation, perhaps (literally, when it comes to private vrchat worlds lol)

[Harlequin]

The idea being to explore the question (through the open, curious and rebellious mind of a teenager seemed to make sense to me, before they get too indoctrinated into the prevailing way of life) of whether the real world would still, in the future, feel sufficiently "real" vs. VR to actually matter.

I would recommend a look at Simulacra and Simulation for this project as well.