John Carmack – 20 years after Doom

• <This is “my” interpretation of the talk>• For official video recording, refer to https://pe

ople.smu.edu/mjhaveri/2014/04/18/carmack/

• https://www.flickr.com/photos/prabindh/14010077142/

John Carmack – 20 years of VR

• Majority of the engineering work is to incrementally improve current status of things. But it is exciting to be at the leading edge, when you do not know what approach is correct, and what is not

• Ideas considered impossible/absurd 20 years ago are now considered possible and contributes to completely different applications. So need to dust off old books/research and re-apply to todays problems

John Carmack – 20 years of VR

• Never lose sight of the value to the end customer

• Don’t try to follow the last big thing• There may be excitement in the 50million$ AAA

game development, but the real thrill of the future is in the small game development

• Javascript may do everything, but still not performant enough. Compiled byte-code, memory safe languages needed

John Carmack – 20 years of VR

• Startup firms need to focus on the now, and next couple of months. Established firms can focus over a year, two years, a decade …

• Latency numbers for practical sensor systems today are of the order of 100s of mSec to several seconds, while processors have reached cycle speeds of nSec

John Carmack – 20 years of VR

• Overdoing things beyond a point – will not make a difference to customers– Ex, Geometric complexity

• Audio output always gets to the listener. But depending on the viewer’s eye movements, upto 90% of visual output can go waste

• While display resolutions scale to 4x to reach 4K resolutions, GPUs may not scale 4x in performance, so GPU tricks are still needed

John Carmack – 20 years of VR

• Retina detection will be a key part of the VR sensor data flow• Audio – HRTF and implementations may not make a big

difference to current UX in games• MMOG will use the first VR applications• Engineers need to solve problems, be it software or hardware.

Hardware engineering is difficult, but gives the material feel• Facebook wants to reach a billion people with VR and new

applications as part of their vision• … The acquisition happened very fast. Just a week after a

meeting with Mark Zuckerberg