See Space Explorers - The Infinite. Filmed on the ISS with 3D 360 degree VR cameras. Has anyone done this? It is coming to Vancouver BD on November 15. Looks interesting.
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Has anyone done “Space Explorers — The Infinite” 3D experience?
- Thread starter ecarfan
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My wife and I had this VR experience today. Our first time wearing VR headsets. They were Oculus units, not sure which version. I was not impressed with them; felt heavy, the earphones didn’t fit well, and the image quality was not nearly as good as I imagined it would be (I was told the source video was very high quality and the headsets can’t display it). And, being a Meta product, my wife and I had no legs; we could see outlines of each other but only from the waist up. Thanks Zuck.
All that said, it was an incredible experience to feel like you were moving around inside the ISS and then you just step “outside” and view the station as if you were hanging in space! Of course you are at 1G but the floor you are standing on appears to be transparent with the headset on.
It was really pretty cool. I told my wife that this was a warmup for when we get to take Starship to orbit. She expressed some skepticism…
It’s opening in Denver CO in February. It is also playing in Montreal. We saw it in Vancouver.
All that said, it was an incredible experience to feel like you were moving around inside the ISS and then you just step “outside” and view the station as if you were hanging in space! Of course you are at 1G but the floor you are standing on appears to be transparent with the headset on.
It was really pretty cool. I told my wife that this was a warmup for when we get to take Starship to orbit. She expressed some skepticism…
It’s opening in Denver CO in February. It is also playing in Montreal. We saw it in Vancouver.
Which isn't a surprise. If it was actually labeled Oculus, that headset would have been purchased before March 2022. The Meta Quest 3 is supposed to be the best of the consumer hardware. Beyond that are the headsets with foveated rendering, which bumps the price quite a bit. Apple's headset is perhaps the poster child of that technology.
Disclaimer: I haven't worn a VR headset since the 90s. If you ever want to hear a tale of frustration, just ask.
Kimmi
Member
This was around 1990. I was working at Digital Equipment Corporation and had done a weekend project with some other engineers to build a flight simulator for DEC workstations. We'd been working on it for several years and it was a hit within the company. A guy in the new Human Interaction Lab (or whatever it was called) contacted us about the possibility of connecting a VR headset to the flight simulator.
I was thrilled at the chance to try it out. We were only doing wireframe display, but it was all 3D perspective stuff, so it should have worked tolerably well. I immediately got to work to generate the needed outputs. Separate feeds for each eye, an inter-ocular distance control, field of view matched, etc. I also did the work needed to take in the headset orientation to control the simulator's camera orientation (no position values, so no moving around). The software was ready to go.
Well, the guy from the lab calls us to the lab to hook everything up. The VR headset probably had 640x480 resolution and weighed so much that it required a literal sandbag on the back to balance the thing. It was pretty heavy, but it was virtual reality. Then we looked at the hardware he had set up for us to drive the headset. I figured that we'd have two display surfaces on the VR device that we could point the flight simulator at which would provide each eye's video. We were using X Windows, so it should have worked on pretty much any device out there. No muss, no fuss.
No. He had two big video cameras pointed at two DEC workstations. We were to display the output from the simulator on each of the workstations, and the video cameras would feed the images from the screens to the eye displays on the headset. It was absurd. Cables all over the place. Imagine watching a screen door image (headset) of a screen door image (workstation). I was thankful that at least the video cameras and the headset displays were synched or would have been three screen doors.
I was furious that he would rope me into wasting my time with something so amateurish, but we plowed ahead. Technically, it worked. We had to spend time carefully pointing the cameras squarely at the workstation screens, framing them precisely, and getting the correct eye on the correct side (change cables), but it showed the 3D wireframe world of the simulator. We could look around. Intellectually I knew it was working, but the actual experience of VR under those conditions was pretty useless.
So it was an academic kludge that we would never show to anyone and nothing ever came of it. I'm still salty about it.
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DEC'y. Pronounced "decky". I think it was generally written as "DECie".
Better than "Digitalite".
Kinda fascinated with DEC. Read most of what I can find on it...." DEC is dead: Long Live DEC (Schein)" is good.
Also kind of Cutler fan ever since he and the boys re-implemented VMS disguised as 32-bit Windows. The stuff at https://neilrieck.net/docs/dave_cutler-prism-mica-emerald-etc.html (seems to be the old Sympatico site info)...
I can't speak highly enough of my experience at DEC. I was a pretty good software engineer who was made much better by my time there, but there were amazing engineers there - like Dave Cutler. They came up with solutions that I can only describe as distilled engineering beauty. Sadly, the executives lacked the business instincts of people like Bill Gates and Steve Jobs. It was a terrible loss when it all came apart.
Somewhat related, "The Soul of a New Machine" is a classic tale from that period that you might enjoy.
I can imagine that was a fascinating place to work int he days. Were you at The Mill?
Oh yeah, great read... as is Custer's "Inside Windows NT" and Pascal's "Showstopper".
Also rather fascinated with PARC... "Dealers of Lightning" is great as well.
Since it's the weekend and we are a tad off-topic already, here's my Geek Reading List:
- The Ultimate Entrepreneur (Rifkin) - Interesting, if somewhat dry, look at how Olsen built, and ultimately ran DEC
- DEC is dead: Long Live DEC (Schein) - Fascinating look at the rise and fall of DEC and many of the factors leading to it’s demise
- Inside Windows NT 1st Edition (Custer) - Mostly technical detail about the NT OS, but interesting forward from Cutler, and insights as to what they built
- Showstopper! (Pascal) - The inside scoop on how Cutler and the boys Gates hired away from DEC built NT
- Dealers of Lightning (Hiltzik) - Fascinating story of PARC, how it came to be, and what they did
- Soul of a new Machine (Kidder) - Classic reading of the inside story of building a new OS for Data General's hot new machine
- Where Wizards Stay Up Late (Hafner) - the story of DARPA/Arpanet/Internet, and how BBN, Stanford, etc... brought it all to be
- Fire in the Valley (Swaine & Freiberger) - The story of the birth of the PC revolution
- Accidental Empires (Cringely) - The rather famous columnist's account of the PC era origins
- In the Plex (Levy) - The inside story of the rise of Google
- Steve Jobs (Isaacson) - The account of Apple's origins and history, with unfettered access to Jobs by the author
- Inside the Cuckoo's Egg (Stohl) - Great tale of chasing a hacker in the early micro/mini days
- Ghost in the Wire (Mitnick) - Kevin's account of his own life as the world's most sought after hacker
- Masters of Doom (Kushner) -Interesting story iD software and their ground-breaking game Doom!
- Folklore.org (website)- Inside accounts from the guys who built the Mac. Presented as snippets.
- Dave Cutler, PRISM, Mica, Emerald, etc. (alt: Dave Cutler, PRISM, Mica, Emerald, etc. (neilrieck.net) ) (website)- Some interesting first hand notes regarding DEC's Alpha, Prism, Mica, etc... projects.
- Insanely Great (Levy) - Another account of the effort to build the Mac, with a focus on how Jobs influenced the team
- The Macintosh Way (Kawasaki) - Product development, team building, and marketing lessons drawn from the Macintosh project, written from the perspective of perhaps Apple's most famous technical evangelist
- Ultimate History of Video Games (Kent) - History and insider perspective on the rise of the video game industry (first coin-op and then home) as a bunch of individual insider snippets woven together
- Crypto (Levy) - Account of how modern digital cryptography was born, and the battle against the gov't to ever get it out in the open
- iWoz (Wozniak & Gina Smith) - First hand account of The Woz's life leading up to and through his career with Apple (And an interesting insight on how 'simple' Steve's thought processes are..)
- Commodork (O'Hara) - Personal account of a guy who ran a C64 BBS in the good ol' days. Not enthralling, but good for a nostalgia kick
- Hackers: Heroes of the Computer Revolution (Levy) - Great history of hackers in the original 'MIT" sense (guys who wanted to do cool stuff with technology), and how they formed the basis for all personal computing.
- Racing the Beam (Montfort & Bogost) - Inside story of what designing for the Atari 2600 was really like
- Hard Drive - Bill Gates and the Making of Microsoft (Wallace & Erickson) - The title says it all
- Stella At 20 (website video) - Bunch of interview footage of folks including Jay Minor (father of Amiga), Nolan Bushnell (Atari), David Crane (Atari, Activision), etc... regarding the early Atari and personal computer history. A lot to wade thru
- The King of Kong: A Fist full of Quarters (video) - Documentary on the competition between high-score addicts that started in the golden era of coin-op
- TILT: The Battle to Save Pinball (video) - Documentary about Williams' last effort to save a dying classic arcade game
- Chasing Ghosts: Beyond the Arcade (video) - A retrospective on the arcade World Champions of 1982
- Super Mario (Ryan) - History of the rise of modern video gaming with a focus on Nintendo
- Microserfs (Coupland)- First hand account of a software developer starting within Microsoft and then moving on.. somewhat whimsical and autobiographical in nature
- Inside Apple (Lashinsky)- Examination of how Apple goes about their business, and how things have been taking place under Tim Cook as compared to Jobs
- Kingpin (Poulsen)- Real life accounts of federal cybercrime investigations in to underground websites and hackers
- Elon Musk: Tesla, SpaceX and the Quest for a Fantastic Future (Vance)- Biography of Elon Musk and his tech accomplishments and aspirations with some fascinating insights as to what makes him a very atypical CEO and entrepreneur
I see that I'm out of my depth with literary references
And, yes, I was at the Mill for the first four years. What a maze. I worked with a guy who had badge number 455 and he'd tell us all these stories about the early days at DEC. A cat dropping onto your desk as it hunted mice, snow that would pile up on the floor over a weekend because there were gaps in the walls (my first office had a hole in the floor through which I could see the office below), stacking sandbags alongside Ken Olsen to keep the Assabet river from flooding the buildings.
Our building had one of those old hand-operated elevators where you'd move the lever one way to go up and the other to go down. It fell to skill to have the elevator meet the floor exactly. That place had a lot of character.
Dangit. Now I've gone to street view to see the old place. It really pulls at the heart strings.
And, yes, I was at the Mill for the first four years. What a maze. I worked with a guy who had badge number 455 and he'd tell us all these stories about the early days at DEC. A cat dropping onto your desk as it hunted mice, snow that would pile up on the floor over a weekend because there were gaps in the walls (my first office had a hole in the floor through which I could see the office below), stacking sandbags alongside Ken Olsen to keep the Assabet river from flooding the buildings.
Our building had one of those old hand-operated elevators where you'd move the lever one way to go up and the other to go down. It fell to skill to have the elevator meet the floor exactly. That place had a lot of character.
Dangit. Now I've gone to street view to see the old place. It really pulls at the heart strings.
Those are awesome tidbits... I would have loved to have been there back in the day. I was really a generation too late to really know/use DEC stuff in it's heyday. The character of the place you describe and the general culture of engineering excellence by a bunch of really bright guys rallying against the dominant mainframes of the time seems like it would have been a blast.
I was bummed when Compaq bought em... only to let the technology languish (Alpha! ), and then HP bought Compaq, sealing the fate of anything DEC that existed at that point. End of an era.
Was it Olsen at the helm when you were there or Palmer?
I was bummed when Compaq bought em... only to let the technology languish (Alpha!
), and then HP bought Compaq, sealing the fate of anything DEC that existed at that point. End of an era.Was it Olsen at the helm when you were there or Palmer?
I was there for 10 years under Ken. As soon as Palmer took over, the entire company atmosphere changed. It was a different company. One of Palmer's first acts was to lay off low performers. We had one guy in our group who was going to be let go. I was ready to leave, he wanted to stay. I talked to our manager (best boss I ever had) and he said that I could take the other guy's place if I wanted to. So I left with six months' severance and the other guy kept his job. Until the next round of layoffs, anyway. Palmer ended up laying off literally half the company's employees.
I don't even consider DEC under Palmer to be DEC. For me, Ken Olsen was DEC.
Cool... that's the vibe I get from everything I've read.... Olsen and Bell really were the engineer's engineer, and Palmer was a slick CEO. At that point I guess it really was writing on the wall.
I really wish the company could have transitioned off the VAX architecture... if only they could have had the vision to kill the sacred cow and let Cutler and the boys implement MICA/PRISM, I would have given them a chance to have really owned the market that eventually became Un*x on RISC and perhaps Wintel. But unfortunately, instead they went the other direction, shutting down DECWest, alienating a bunch of incredible talent.
What did you work on in your tenure there?
I really wish the company could have transitioned off the VAX architecture... if only they could have had the vision to kill the sacred cow and let Cutler and the boys implement MICA/PRISM, I would have given them a chance to have really owned the market that eventually became Un*x on RISC and perhaps Wintel. But unfortunately, instead they went the other direction, shutting down DECWest, alienating a bunch of incredible talent.
What did you work on in your tenure there?
Absolutely. Palmer chopped off the company into various parts and sold them to Oracle, Compaq and others. Compaq simply didn't know what to do with these engineers and their products. Culture did not synch well. Same with EDS too.
From 1988 to 2000. My best software engineering years were with Vax to Alpha OpenVMS porting team working on Decnet Phase V and specifically migrating DEC DTM (Digital Transaction Manager) to Alpha. DEC DTM is the core component that ensured consistency in an underlying systems task, and is used in a variety of products that were layered on top of it - like all DB products, clustering, etc... A large portion of it was in Pascal and of course Fortran. Then I moved to SNA Gateway team which was sold to Compaq and then sold to EDS and then absorbed into HP. Left HP in 2007.
DEC was a great engineer's paradise. HP was good too. Worked on a bunch of network protocol and management products in HP. Those products were spun over to Agilent Technologies. All of my core systems and network programming skills were grounded and hardened in those days of DEC and HP.
I did come across Mr. Olsen walking around The Mill a few times. Never spoke to him. Mostly stationed in ZKO and LKG and a bit in MKO
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