Yeah, so this could definitely just be an app. And then it would only be like 50% as stupid.

1920 x 1200 display inside a cylinder

So it’s a phone screen hooked up to a chatbot, bolted to one of those little gadget display turntables, with a servo on it. Got it. I’ll bet you it’s even running on Android behind the scenes.

INB4 some weeb makes an open source version of this.

This sounds like the Circuit City paradigm, which is to fire all your expensive experienced workers and try to fill their roles with fresh-faced grads or, more likely, H1B people from India at the absolute minimum pay scale.

And we saw how that worked for Circuit City.

Wow, if only someone could find a way to miniaturize and “reimagine” this technology to put it in the phone itself…

Oh, right.

Well, that’s encouraging. I happen to own a Reverb G2 so maybe I should check it out and report back.

Anyway, the 3DoF is three degrees of freedom, i.e. you can rotate your viewpoint on a fixed point in terms of pitch (up and down), yaw (side to side), and roll (tilt your head and look at things sideways and upside down). 6DoF adds the other three axes, i.e. in addition to all of the above you can also walk around and have a non-fixed viewpoint – which in terms of actual VR gameplay is almost certainly what you want. Enabling this via Basalt (there are two other SLAM options as well, apparently) is something I have no experience with.

The WMR controllers are connected to your machine via Bluetooth and at least in the case of the Reverb G2, there is a built in Bluetooth receiver in the headset itself which in normal operation, i.e. in Windows, means the entire ensemble can act as a single all in one solution without having to use any additional outboard hardware. Unless there is some kind of technical reason not to I can’t see why you wouldn’t use it that way versus using a secondary Bluetooth dongle, but I haven’t tired recently either.

Last time I looked the WMR support was in beta or something and it supported only the headsets, not the controllers. So at least this is progress.

The last time I checked, which was not very long ago, Monado has partial experimental support for WMR headsets with head tracking only and does not support WMR controllers. You can probably work around this by using Vive controllers or similar, but then you’re back to using base stations just for the controllers and at that rate you may as well get an entire Vive/Valve setup and be done with it.

It’s a transparent attempt to lock you in to buying their filament. If you want to know how the community at large feels about this, just go to your favorite objects repository and see how many solutions people have developed for ripping the RFID tags out of the Bambu spools and integrating them into spools from other brands just to make the damn machine happy with it.

It really doesn’t add any “godsending.” It’s not difficult to, when you stick a new spool of filament in the machine, tell your slicer what that spool was. It’s not like you’re changing spools every 30 seconds, especially if your machine has some manner of multi-spool box like the AMS or various other brands’ versions of the same.

Unless you changed filament type presets in your slicer, the only way the machine would know is if the spools were equipped with RFID tags and the printer has a matching reader. Bambu infamously does this but to my knowledge Elegoo does not.

I never knew such a thing existed, but I’ll look into it.

I don’t touch the workbenches much. Up until now I’ve never found a use for them, and most of the ones I’ve tried on a lark tended to be buggy enough to be more trouble than they’re worth.

How prescient Orwell turned out to be.

Premium Pro Max Doubleplus Good.

Agreed.

I don’t predict this machine is going to set the world on fire. There is only so much Centipede and Missile Command a sane person can play on the go, after all.

I think its ultimate fate is mostly going to be incessantly being pimped by sponsored influencers until we’re all sick of it.

Well, I’ll bet you a nickel it runs on some kind of minimal Linux environment and uses open source emulators in violation of the GPL and/or whatever other licenses they have. So there’ll be that, I’m sure. But I see your point.

Nice. The GPD devices are expensive, but solid. I have a Win Max 2 and it’s been consistently great.

Agreed. Never Meta. I will happily go back to using a damn Virtual Boy before ever buying a Meta product, even if they’re the only choice left.

It continually baffles me that people will intentionally buy a device covered in cameras and microphones made by and connected directly to Facebook and wave it around inside their home.

This is explicity and exclusively PC tethered. I don’t think Pimax has ever made a standalone VR device.

External GPU’s do indeed exist but at the moment they’re still kind of crap compared to a full PCI-E bus.

I think you slipped a digit or two, there. The original IBM PC was released in 1981, can’t nothing on the PC side be older than that. It definitely wasn’t 1967.

In 1967, state of the art was something like the IBM System 360:

[Insert XKCD “Standards” strip here.]

Nuclear has its place in the world, and it’s pretty much a given that in order to maintain high availability and energy stability we will not be able to rely solely on one single source. It can’t be all renewables, but it can’t be all nuclear, either. We are going to need a mix of both.

Nuclear can serve e.g. big time industrial, manufacturing, or other mission critical needs with large amounts of power that is reasonably clean and, importantly, very stable.

We just need to keep it from falling totally into the hands of morons who want to waste it all on “AI” datacenters, or whatever the fuck else.

Yeah, idiots can also spill a couple of million barrels of oil into the Gulf of Mexico. Whoopsie doodle! I guess that’s just the cost of doing business, amirite? Good thing stuff like that always happens far away…