Or consistently fail to make Beyond Good and Evil 2 for several decades.

I do too, but I’d highly doubt it will. It’s well known that Meta sells every headset at a loss and funds the expenditure via revenue from their gargantuan advertising and spy network, specifically to squeeze out competitors and make it harder to enter the VR market as a newcomer. Zuck Zuck still thinks all the prime real estate in the metaverse is going to be his, because he only read the first half of Snow Crash.

Gabe is a rich man and I assume he and his company could take this approach as well if they wanted to, at least temporarily. But based on their pricing for their past hardware (particularly the Steam Deck), I predict they won’t.

Insufficient pedantry detected.

The PC platform is an extension of IBM’s Personal Computer architecture, which was not a description of what it was so much as it was literally the brand name. It’s long since been forgotten that this is now a shorthand, and the full name of the platform arguably ought to be PC Compatible. Unless you bought your machine from IBM, anyway, which these days would be quite the trick.

Being PC compatible was a big deal back when the original PC was also a big deal. Probably slightly less so now, since it’s the assumed default.

It should go without saying that the original IBM PC, model 5150, did not run Windows… Because Windows did not yet exist. It didn’t even necessarily run the then-nascent PC-DOS provided by Microsoft, because IBM also supported running CP/M and and UCSD Pascal on it.

The whole Windows-as-default thing didn’t happen until well after the appeal of the PC specification had escaped containment at IBM and x86 had handily taken over the desktop computing world.

A personal computer is basically anything you can stick on your desk (or lap) and doesn’t require hooking up to a mainframe to run. But a Personal Computer, capital P and C, implies an x86 compatible platform with architecture designed such that it is technically still capable of running all those decades old 8086 programs and operating systems. (Just, several orders of magnitude faster than their designers ever envisioned, and probably only by sticking your UEFI BIOS in legacy mode first.)

FYI, technically Meta/Facebook had already owned Oculus for something like five years before the original Quest came out. They just started getting really blatant about the branding shortly after that time, probably to acquiesce to Zuck Zuck and his huffing of his “metaverse” crack pipe increasingly frequently.

No one who isn’t a venture capital weirdo actually gives a shit about “XR” or any kind of augmented reality.

Maybe I’m not phrasing that correctly for people with chronic brain rot to understand. Here:

Zero 👏 percent 👏 of 👏 ordinary 👏 users 👏 care 👏 about 👏 XR/AR.

For anyone doing the math at home, that’s even fewer people who than those who are potential VR customers in the first place, which are already objectively far fewer potential customers compared to, just for sake of argument, console sales or ordinary PC gaming.

I don’t know what it’s going to take for this to finally sink in for Big Tech. Possibly a shovel applied smartly upside the head. Users want to easily play VR games and watch VR porn, and maybe in extended use case scenarios have virtual work environments with multiple floating pseudomonitors or hang a virtual IMAX movie screen in space or whatever. The list ends right there.

No one wants to walk around outside with a bulbous display thingy on their face. No one wants to venture out into the world with their peripheral vision reduced to 110° and tripping over everything. No one has ever developed a compelling use case for ordinary consumers to have “content” (reality check: most of which will ultimately be spyware or ads) floated in front of their eyeballs mixed with the real world. The primary function people actually use the Quest/WMR/Frame passthrough for is brief stints for figuring out where they set down their coffee cup, or finding their keyboard, or avoiding stepping on the cat. That’s it. Monochrome passthrough is fine for that. Color would be neat, sure, but monochrome sensors are faster and have better dynamic range and higher sensitivity, which translates to better controller tracking performance, and that’s something everyone will bitch about if it’s bad.

Hololens was dead on arrival. The Apple Vision was dead on arrival. Android XR and by extension Galaxy XR are dead on arrival. Valve doesn’t need to make a bunch of compromises to compete in the “consumer XR market” because there is no consumer XR market. The Frame is a VR gaming headset designed as a VR gaming headset, for VR gamers. Period.

The Frame doesn’t have to “disrupt” anything. It has to do everything the Quest 3 does and manage do it roughly as well, while not being sold by Mark Zuckerberg’s creepy ass.

In that case who knows what it was. This is one of those rare instances where it’d be awesome to have a flame spectrometer.

That was never actually an official statement. It was an offhand comment by some staffer that didn’t carry any legal weight nor accurately describe the internal trajectory for Windows in any way. As much as we like to poke fun at it regardless.

It could be either given that Alyx ended on a cliffhanger that ties it back to the original series. They’d better come up with something, or else they’re going to have another riot on their hands.

It was pretty janky. I received a download code for Half Life 2 in the box with my Radeon 9800 Pro several months before the game was actually released. I didn’t have a lot of use for Steam before then, but I installed it anyway and my account is so old that back when the account IDs were still numeric and sequential, mine was four digits.

I still have my boxed copy of the Orange Box on a shelf. It still sees use because every once in a while I get embroiled in a Kids These Days type of conversation and I need a prop to wave around.

I’d happily put an orange Gabecube right next to it.

As opposed to what, buying a viable phone from those other guys?

What other guys?

At minimum a stampede of people moving to iPhones should theoretically cause Google to shit enough of a brick (providing capitalism actually works as advertised, and for the record I am trying like hell to keep a straight face as I type this) to correct their behavior in an attempt to win some of those users back.

Because at the end of the day most consumers are consumers, not nerds, and if neither platform is going to allow you control over your device and they’re both privacy nightmares you’re not much worse off with an iDevice if you plan on owning a smartphone in the first place.

What we really need is a viable third option. Hopefully an inherently non-shitty one. The barrier to market entry seems pretty high, though.

No, because the hardware is not out to the public yet and nobody’s thoroughly tested it. Or if they have, I haven’t found any published results yet. We’ll see when this thing actually starts hitting the streets.

My current headset is also a WMR unit, a Reverb G2, and it works well enough for me. If the Frame is at least as good as that, I’m golden. But I find it hard to believe Valve of all people would not be aware of the limitations of inside out tracking and not done the best they absolutely could with it.

Maybe they didn’t. If that’s the case, they’re going to have a problem on their hands.

Eyy, Reverb gang.

Apparently there is third party support in Linux under Mondao but it still seems pretty developmental and I haven’t had the time to mess with it yet. I’m still clinging to mine as well, because at least for now it still works and I’ve blocked Windows from rug-pulling my WMR app. I’m sure that’ll only last until the next time I need to reformat and reinstall in a couple of years.

There is apparently going to be an optional grip strap that replicates this functionality. There are sensors in the new controllers that can sense the grip of all five fingers.

You can mix controllers and headsets in SteamVR, right? At least if you’re tethered or “streaming” or whatever from Steam on PC, I imagine you could use this plus an existing pair of lighthouse driven controllers if you really wanted to. If you can’t out of the box, I expect it to take about twelve seconds for motivated nerds to figure out how to force it into happening.

I obviously wouldn’t hold your breath for that being a thing when you’re using it as a standalone device.

If you still have the length of filament you cut off, you can verify your temperature theory pretty easily by loading it up temporarily and trying increasing nozzle temperatures until you get it to extrude. That spool of filament may have been contaminated by having a couple of pellets of the wrong stuff in it. Plain PET (rather than PETG) is most likely, I think, and that stuff won’t extrude until you wind your nozzle up to probably about 240° C.

It might have been a diameter issue as well, but I’d doubt it. My printer’s drive gears can still grab objects that are quite a bit smaller than the prescribed 1.75mm filament diameter, and if the stuff were so thin or thick it wouldn’t feed I think it’d be quite obvious to the naked eye. I imagine this is the case with pretty much any modern printer.

Kirby’s Adventure is the largest NES game ever officially released in terms of ROM size, and has a frankly absurd amount of graphics tiles. Just consider all of those required for the copy abilities thumbnails alone and you’ll see what I mean. It pulled basically every trick the MMC3 mapper is capable of, and was definitely a masterpiece of the system in the original sense, i.e. it displays astonishing mastery of the mechanics of the Famicom/NES.

What I find more amazing is that the MMC3 isn’t one of the mappers that confers any additional sound channels and the American NES didn’t support that capability anyway. So the entirety of the game’s iconic soundtrack fits within the confines of the NES’ two square waves, one triangle wave, one noise channel, and singular PCM channel.

I think ultimately it ran into memory constraints, even with the additional 8 KB provided by the mapper. If you sit back and look at them as a whole, its levels are all quite short. It’s still my favorite NES game bar none, though.

World has everything 3 introduced, except you can’t be a frog.

Kek. 🐸

Click The Monkey And Win!

It’s like we’re in 1999 all over again.

Valve’s strategy here seems to be to build physical inertial tracking into the controllers as well. They both have an IMU built in which presumably gives them a pretty decent ability to guess where they’ve been moved in physical space even if they’re outside of the cameras’ field of view. I don’t know if anyone has accurately assessed how well that works in this case.