Oculus Rift VR

Oculus Rift. (OR)
VR's big comeback. Or at least the biggest name in VR these last couple of years.

The set up OR of the day - we played on a laptop

I was, and still am extremely excited by the immense possibilities the OR brings to VR and can't wait to see how things will develop in the future!
Especially with Star Citizen "coming out" at the end of this year. This VR/AR headset has so many different applications that VR/AR comes with including remote tele-operations, education, entertainment media including games, videos, etc.

I was able to try the OR thanks to a fellow Computer Science student, after I participated in his research at the CSIRO/RSISE in ANU. He said many people experienced nausea and couldn't take more than 10 minutes with the OR on, but surprisingly, I didn't want to vomit at all, and quite enjoyed it! This might have been partly due to my biggest disappointment - being able to see the pixels and pixel borders after the LCD screen's light passes through the OR's lenses. The lenses let your eyes see the screen from individual perspectives creating a 3D experience, as well as helping you be able to focus your eyes to infinite distance while being able to look at the light from the screen.

Here are some photos:

Always RTFM first right? I like Friendly Manuals.

Includes 3 different lenses for near-sighted people. Otherwise, you can wear your glasses inside/under the headset.

 Le treasure chest. And headset.

 Side - angle views. The viewing angles on the display were pretty darn good.

Too bad you can clearly see the black pixel borders when you put on the goggles through the lenses. It's worse than it appears in this photo with my camera.


An OR with one lens cap (left) taken off.








And a close up of that area below:

I think the biggest thing going for the OR is that it makes you feel like you're there. This makes for just the wonder and awe of exploring the world that you're now in - when you wear the headset - to be quite a delight.

The biggest problem I had that broke the immersion was seeing the black pixel border lines, I hope this will be fixed in future higher resolution versions. It also alerted me to having to try before I buy the consumer version, since I definitely wouldn't spend $300 on the immersion breaking and awfully low-res to the point of blurriness (720p screen divided into half for each eye) dev-kit as a consumer product.

I could also feel a bit of latency or probably judder, although it's being worked on, and I think my head naturally compensated by moving my head slower. (Valve is supporting Oculus Rift and aren't manufacturing hardware for now, preferring to be a platform where OR users will seamlessly launch apps and games from). Unfortunately, this must also be checked out before I buy for gaming purposes, as when you're desperately looking around the cockpit for that hostile spacecraft, you don't want your vision to be blurry and laggy, creating more nausea or noobplay.


A little Carmack envisioning a SoC (running Android) 4K integrated headset/future OR:
http://www.engadget.com/2013/10/18/oculus-rift-john-carmack-interview/


And most recently:

CES 2014 (Crystal Cove) updates:

• 1080p OLED (still not sure that's enough resolution after the lenses)
• New Positional tracking via IR-LEDs on the OR and an external camera on your monitor. 
• Lighter, smaller
• Lower latency, via OLED & technologies as talked about in the video in the link below
• Apparently winner of "Best of CES 2014"
• Still aimed to price accessibly at ~$300
• No release date but 2014 "big year" for OR

http://www.engadget.com/2014/01/09/the-oculus-rift-crystal-cove-prototype-is-2014s-best-of-c/
So apparently they sold 55k units, with only 7.5k units sold during their Kickstarter!

For those worried about nausea, with positional tracking, it might be better. Someone does a write-up of their pleasant experience with Crystal Cove after previous nausea with the old version:
http://www.pcgamer.com/2014/01/10/oculus-rift-crystal-cove-prototype-hands-on-at-ces-2014/

Australian Space Agency - why

Came across a good article here about why Australia needs a space agency, and how we can create our own solutions instead of piggybacking off others and be able to build a new industry which benefits us.


The ACSER seems pretty cool.
I wonder if the GPS module could be used for other Australian spacecraft ...

Also, if you read my Mt Stromlo (AIAA tour) post back in early August when AIAA Sydney Section toured Canberra, here are some projects that the AITC are looking at at the moment. Hope I get to participate soon =)

KSP update 0.22

Kerbal Space Program is one of the funnest games ever, superseding The Sims and will probably take 2nd place in my all-time favourite game list, after Tribes 1. That is, until Star Citizen comes out and dominates the list. I love the open and mod-able, community driven aspects of this game. =)

This most recent update finally gives the option of inserting sub-assemblies to new designs, so you can finally import 2 assemblies/designs from different saved designs without having to build from scratch! Kind of like importing parts into a CAD assembly. I have no more excuse to not play this game (it's on Linux! via Unity =D) ... although uni study beckons Dx



Also, an abridged list of stupid things that I have done (a full list would be way too long). These are rookie mistakes which experience, if not proper systems engineering would (hopefully) have mitigated.

• Not realising you forgot to put parachutes on your spaceship until you've re-entered the atmosphere
• Using all your fuel to achieve a high orbit and realising your Kerbonauts are now stranded ... hope they're not hungry
• Forgetting to activate solar panels once in orbit so your spacecraft (a planned addition to a collection of spaceships docked together forming a "space station") runs out of electrical charge. It's also unmanned so can no longer be controlled. Recovery mission is being planned (yes, one is also being planned for my stranded Kerbonauts, though admittedly with much lower priority xD)

And there we have our top 3 "oh crap, I'm so stupid" moments so far =)
The game has also prompted learning of orbital mechanics and stuff and is a great companion to: The Basics of Spaceflight - brought to you by JPL, "we do everything cool".

Kid's can't use computers

http://www.coding2learn.org/blog/2013/07/29/kids-cant-use-computers/

Interesting article about how kids or the younger generation these days aren't really computer literate. They're just proficient users of browsers and web-apps.

Without reference to Wikipedia, can you tell me what the difference is between The Internet, The World Wide Web, a web-browser and a search engine?

Had to wikipedia what WWW was.

Can't wait for COMP3300 and COMP3310 xP. Also need to be proficient in at least one language =/