Michael Abrash Joins Oculus, Calls Facebook 'Final Piece of the Puzzle' 232
trawg writes: "Programming legend Michael Abrash has announced that he has joined the Oculus team to work on the Rift VR headset as Chief Scientist, and will be once again working with John Carmack to bring VR to life. His post covers a lot of ground, including the history of his quest for VR, and ends with his explanation of why he thinks the Facebook acquisition is ultimately a good thing — they have the engineering, resources and long-term commitment 'to solve the hard problems of VR.'"
Abrash has long maintained a blog about VR tech — it's worth reading if the subject matter interests you.
Re:Legendary... (Score:1, Informative)
Programming legend Michael Abrash...
Who?
You don't know him?!?
Re:Legendary... (Score:5, Informative)
Re:Legendary... (Score:5, Informative)
"Michael Abrash is a game programmer and technical writer specializing in optimization and 80x86 assembly language, game programming, a reputation cemented by his 1990 book Zen of Assembly Language Volume 1: Knowledge. Related issues were covered in his later book Zen of Graphics Programming. [...] After working at Microsoft on graphics and assembly code for Windows NT 3.1, he returned to the game industry in the mid-1990s to work on Quake for id Software. "
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/M... [wikipedia.org]
Re:Legendary... (Score:5, Informative)
He's well known if you're into the low-level machinery of game graphics.
Re:Legendary... (Score:5, Informative)
Also responsible for much of the graphics in NT.
Re:Facebook is written in php (Score:2, Informative)
1: They have done more for biometric security and automated facial recognition than virtually any other company out there.
Yes, but by massively invading the privacy of people who genererally thought they were just sending messages to their friends instead of participating in this research. (sure the ToS and disclaimers were in place, and while they covered their legal asses, their ethics leave everything to be desired.)
2: They have a very well made system for hunting down people who are actual people versus dummy/sock puppet accounts that get squashed.
How many pets have facebook accounts again? Actual people my ass.
3: They are excellent at geolocation.
In that people tell them where they are by various means (deliberate and inadvertently -- usually the latter, and then they know where you are.)
4: They created the "commodity hardware, have the backend application do all the redundancy"
er... no. Lots of people did that.
5: They have the best behavioral reporting and profiling tech out there. Want to check if people 18-25 are interested in your new widget? Easily done by a FB trial balloon.
True? I assume. I wouldnt' know.
6: FB advertising is one of the few channels that work. People turn off their TV, but the FB ads will still come to them no matter what. I've used it to propagate info for a non-profit gathering... and attendance doubled.
It works well for some stuff, yes.
7: FB is one of the few enterprises that can actually get btrfs from an early beta state to a finished product that can handle production data. Without Facebook, btrfs would probably spend another five years being semi-ignored.
Maybe. They are larger and motivated I'll give them that.
8: FB is one of the few Internet based companies, who, a year after IPO, has stock prices higher than they were when hitting the market and still solid.
Sad but true.
9: FB has very tight security. You never see a note about Facebook being hacked, and in security, no news is good news.
LOL. Check again. Several high profile hacks of various types.
10: FB is platform agnostic
???
Like pretty much any website. Ever.
So, even though people bag FB, it is one of the smartest-run businesses on the face of the planet.
Says anyone about any company on an upward trend.
And from the summary:
" they have the engineering, resources and long-term commitment 'to solve the hard problems of VR.'
I agree. I beleive facebook has the commitment and resources to solve the hard problems of VR. Namely: monetizing it effectively it with ads, and using the data of people using it to figure out how to sell them more crap.
What about InfinitEye? (Score:4, Informative)
After the FB/Oculus news, I looked into alternatives and found about this InfinitEye [roadtovr.com] project from France that claims to do 210 degree of horizontal FOV, fully covering the human peripheral vision (while the Rift only does only 90 degrees). I'd pay attention to this one now.
Re:Legendary... (Score:5, Informative)
You must be kidding me.
When I was in high school, I discovered Abrash's Zen of Graphics Programming, filled with all kinds of gems. And then, Quake came out and there was his Graphics Programming Black Book.
Between x86 optimization, BSP trees, and assorted C/C++ tricks, Abrash's books were bibles at a time when graphics programming was just taking off.
I remember writing my own ray-tracer and 3d engine based on what I learned in his books.
Then there was his book on Zen of Code Optimization, which was amazing and filled with all kinds of computational optimization techniques for a time when not using a memory register effectively meant your render would stop halfway.
Michael Abrash and John Carmack were legends -- their techniques in optimizing rendering engines and their efforts in making graphics programming accessible to wider audiences were instrumental in enabling high end graphics. In fact, makers of graphics cards were known to design features based on optimization techniques that were used in Quake and other rendering engines.
And there was also something called "demo scene", where people built amazing programming snippets of graphics, media, and art. Between that and Abrash and Carmack's work, graphics got to where we are today.
So, yeah. Your question shows an unfortunate level of ignorance on the origins of the graphics programming industry.
Re:Legendary... (Score:5, Informative)
Get over yourself... "turn in your geek card" indeed...
No. Seriously. Turn in your geek card.
A geek would be interested even if they werent interested in graphics programming. Thats why Abrash was a writer for Dr Dobbs Programmers Technical Journal, not Graphics Weekly.
I have no interest in writing an operating system, yet Dr Dobbs also covered the porting of BSD to the 386 architecture culminating in 386BSD [wikipedia.org] which I was an avid follower of.
You sir, are a technology brat, not a geek.