Oculus CTO John Carmack on the VR challenges of the Quest and Rift S



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Carmack says he's pushed it from the beginning for rendering remotely on the Quest. It's something developers have played with the Gear VR, but it's never been fast enough to be viable. Oculus colleagues also thought that they might need an extra accessory to work properly on the Quest, such as a 60 GHz WiFi adapter or a Displayport cable via USB-C. But Carmack was convinced that they could do it with the onboard hardware of the helmet and a single cable. It turns out that he was right.

"Internally, we have a lot of perfectionists at Oculus and I have a lot of arguments about value, where you can look at something and say that it's terrible for X, Y reasons. and Z, "said Carmack. "But if people find value, I tend to let people choose to do things, even if other people think that the level of quality is not high enough. We have a lot of debates about the minimum quality and poisoning the well [of interest for VR with bad solutions]. "

Due to the variability of speed and latency of WiFi, it made more sense to launch Link over a direct USB-C connection, where these problems do not exist. The video encoder used by Oculus is also limited to 150 Mbps, which is easily supported by the USB 3.0 standard (and technically it should go with the USB 2.0 ports too). Carmack said the company would still like to optimize Link for it to work properly via WiFi.

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And while Oculus may never officially support this feature, he said you could even connect to a remote computer via the cloud and broadcast a virtual reality experience. Developers could also optimize their games for rendering in the cloud, for example by managing some processes locally, but found that it was difficult to convince developers to adopt new risky architectures. (It's still bitter – developers do not widely adopt its "precious layers of Timewarp" to make VR scenes more clearly.)

Because Oculus controls both hardware and the desktop, it can also implement remote rendering more efficiently than previous attempts. Carmack says its implementation eliminates some layers of complexity, allowing the remote rendering engine to speak directly to Quest's OpenMAX Android driver. The big delivery? The latency is well below that expected when playing a VR video stream on the Quest.

Ultimately, Carmack hopes to work more closely with Qualcomm to gain low-level access to its processors. This would allow him to create a custom microcode to essentially treat the Quest as a remote monitor. He would be able to compress the VR video wire line by line, instead of emptying the image buffer at one time. Surprisingly enough, Carmack said it was even possible to let Link's Quest offer lower latency than the Rift S. It's mainly because of their different display: the Rift's LCD S has a global shutter. once. The Quest OLED screen has a rolling shutter that allows it to offer up to lower latency.

For now, Carmack says you can expect the current implementation of Link on the Quest to look like a mobile app when you move your head. But you will probably feel some latency when you move from one side to the other or you would use the controllers a lot. I did not notice much during my demos, but I have not seen anything really fast.

The rest of the Carmack conference covered a wide variety of topics. Here are some highlights:

  • He held a kind of funeral praise for the Gear VR, a device that sold well, but did not keep users interested long. He attributed the main reason for the friction associated with the use of a smartphone, as this involved taking your phone out of a holster, plugging it into the gear, and then losing it. access to your most important computer device. Quest almost completely reduces friction when entering virtual reality, which is probably one of the main reasons for its success.
  • Carmack is very happy to add an Oculus Go compatibility layer to the Quest. He hopes that future VR users can experience a "retro VR" scene, in which they can easily play all games of the first generation. He wants to avoid something like changing Apple to 64-bit iOS applications, which have killed access to all older 32-bit applications.
  • Ultimately, Carmack wants access to all the 3D movies ever made in the Quest. Its two screens can mimic the stereoscopic effect of 3D glasses, a feature that could prove extremely useful if we move away from 3D televisions (most 4K TVs do not support it anymore).
  • Now that Fandango is on the Oculus platform, you can also watch all your MoviesAnywhere VR purchases. Carmack predicts that virtual reality headsets are among the best screens in your home for watching movies.
  • Carmack admitted that the Quest's OLED display could run up to 90Hz, but the company did not move at 72Hz because it was a more realistic frequency for mobile gaming. He was considering unblocking the 90Hz refresh rate for Oculus Link content, but he was warned that this would make Quest's FCC certification pass. (I'm sure that a fearless hacker will find a way to achieve this.)

Follow all the latest news from Oculus Connect 6 here!

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