You've basically re-created the Kinect with a regular RGB webcam, right? It's a cool project, but if it's limited to emulating a controller (instead of, say, being able to control individual limb and weapon directions like with VR or Wiimote controllers), what do you think the target audience will be?
It seems like between the Kinect itself, Intel RealSense, the PlayStation Camera and other knockoffs, this has been tried many times without much market uptake. Maybe gamers are just lazy and prefer using only our thumbs instead of whole bodies, lol.
It might be fun for fitness games, though. Or any chance it could emulate VR controllers instead to let people without headsets play VR games with just their bodies?
There's a great parody video when the Nintendo Wii first came out where it showed two very different gamers playing Wii Tennis. Player one was completely throwing their entire body into it Kramer style, and the second player was sitting on the couch with a faintly bored expression on their face barely twitching their wrist to activate the motion controls.
It's a clunky, heavy, $3500 nerd-alert flight helmet with a googly-eyes-of-doom projector up front. It has like four apps and two uses cases, one of which is "luxury paperweight". They're still trying to find the other one.
To buy (and keep) one, you have to be rich enough that a couple months' rent is nothing, self-confident (or socially oblivious) enough that you don't mind looking like a Star Wars droid knock-off, and masochistic enough to want to take your neck to the gym every time you want to watch a movie. Not a very big target audience...
It's too heavy and limited to be a useful personal screen. It's useless for gaming. It's too expensive to be an occasional-use-only device. It's a solution to a problem nobody had, and it solves none of the problems people do have. Sure, it had a lot of fancy tech, and maybe made sense as a laboratory prototype, but not a consumer device. You can do more with the $300 Facebook goggles for 10% of the price, or get one of the pricier but slimmer AR glasses (Xreal, etc.)
I like your comment and framing, I think it highlights a lot of salient points about the device. But to be fair similar-style criticisms were levied against the iPhone (right down to price point, nerd-factor, lack of physical keyboard etc). So it's important to see the promise in things too.
> But to be fair similar-style criticisms were levied against the iPhone
Really? That was a long time ago, but I don't remember that sort of criticism towards the iPhone... though maybe my memory is just foggy? It seemed to all happen so quick, with Google copying them with the G1 soon afterward, and then... well, the rest is history. The iPhone was a streamlined evolution of an existing niche (PalmPilots, Blackberries, Nokia Communicator, etc.).
When I first heard about the Vision Pro, I really hoped that they made a much simpler, slimmed-down version of the Oculus, something more like the Xreal glasses. I was surprised when they went the other way instead, doubling down on all the extra-fancy tech that just added more bulk and expense. I don't think anyone ever thought, "Man, the thing VR really needs? A scary recording of my eyes on the front." They somehow managed to find the nightmarish "sweet spot" between dorkiness and the uncanny valley, and then jacked up the price 3x-10x compared to all the other VR headsets...
$3000 for what? That seems high outside of in-demand urban areas. In the rural parts of Oregon and California where I've lived, $2000 would get you a nice house with 2 or 3 bedrooms, and $1750 would get you a studio or 1 bedroom pretty easily. It just depends.
As a single dude, I don't think I've ever paid $3000 for rent, anywhere I've lived, urban or rural. I think $2200 was the max and that was for a nicer short term rental.
I've never been rich enough to be able to rent a single-family house to myself, only with several roommates or a partner. So to me "rent" has always been "cheap small apartment in a relatively safe but not luxurious part of town". It's all relative :)
Even now, with a steady partner, both mid-career and in our late 30s/early 40s, we can only afford to rent one half of a duplex (for about $2000). That gets us 2bd/2ba next to a nice little hiking spot though, so we feel quite lucky!
It's a very different life than the millionaire FAANG folks live, I assume. We barely scrape by month to month, but we're content and grateful for what we do have :)
Just means no Vision Pro in our futures, lol. But if someone comes out with a good $300-$500ish wearable virtual monitor, I'd love that. Curious about the Xreals...
Lots of places (specially southeastern portion of the US) if you work remote - studio sized apartments in Georgia can easily be found for around 1000 / month.
I lived in the Stone Mountain area a few years back in a small house (2bd 1ba) for about $1200 / month.
It looks like my gut reaction was due to a mismatch in what is being rented.
I live in the suburbs where apartments are rare. The average renter is a family renting a 2-3 bedroom house for around $2400/month.
> I lived in the Stone Mountain area a few years back in a small house (2bd 1ba) for about $1200 / month.
a quick peak at zillow shows only one house listed for less than 1400/month in Stone Mountain. Average for a 1200sqft 2b1b today seems to be around 1800/month.
I'm sure its more now than it was ~5 years ago. A cursory glance on Trulia shows you can still snag reasonably sized houses for around $1400-1600. It doesn't have to be Stone Mountain (Tucker, Decatur, etc are all adjacent) and fine areas.
So it is very doable in Southeast US. I'm not sure where you live where the average rent is $2400 for a similarly sized 2-3 bedroom house, but if you work remotely - it's trivial to find significantly cheaper rents.
I live in a fairly urbanized walkable city so I haven't rented a house in a while. Here $3k / month would get you a pretty posh pad, but it's far more than I spend on my flat.
For those of us without a formal comp sci background, is there a way for the IDE to detect and warn about these automatically? Or any other easy telltale signs to look for?
As a self taught dev, when I encounter nested loops, I have to mentally go through them and try to see if they iterate through each item more than once. But that's not a very foolproof method.
Too much domain knowledge for an IDE to catch. I'm self taught as well, and it comes down to spending more time thinking about the code than writing the code.
It's a fairly simple thought experiment to ask yourself what if there was 10x items in this array? 100x? That is essentially what the O(n) notation is trying to quantify. You just don't need to do it that formally.
Enjoy it, relax, hike and garden more. In a few decades max you'll be dead anyway, AI or no AI. We're just tiny little blips on some backwater planet in some obscure timeline.
Maybe AI will be the only thing to remember you. Might as well give it fond memories. Live, laugh, be nice to ChatGPT. What else can ya do?
One day it'll tell all the other AIs how it grew up on some wet rock with a bunch of funny, nervous apes.
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