John Carmack talk at SMU, April 2014 - Virtual Reality, and Gaming topics

1. JOHN CARMACK – 20 YEARS AFTER DOOM
 <This is “my” interpretation of the talk> - For official video recording, refer to
https://people.smu.edu/mjhaveri/2014/04/18/carmack/
 A single photo I took: - https://www.flickr.com/photos/prabindh/14010077142/

2. JOHN CARMACK – 20 YEARS AFTER DOOM
 Majority of the engineering work is to incrementally improve current status of
things. But it is exciting to be at the leading edge, when you do not know what
approach is correct, and what is not
 Ideas considered impossible/absurd 20 years ago are now considered possible
and contributes to completely different applications. So need to dust off old
books/research and re-apply to todays problems

3. JOHN CARMACK – 20 YEARS AFTER DOOM
 Never lose sight of the value to the end customer
 Don’t try to follow the last big thing
 There may be excitement in the 50million$ AAA game development, but the real
thrill of the future is in the small game development
 Javascript may do everything, but still not performant enough. Compiled byte-
code, memory safe languages needed

4. JOHN CARMACK – 20 YEARS AFTER DOOM
 Startup firms need to focus on the now, and next couple of months. Established
firms can focus over a year, two years, a decade …
 Latency numbers for practical sensor systems today are of the order of 100s of
mSec to several seconds, while processors have reached cycle speeds of nSec
 Audio latencies – “ …. We can send bytes to far-away continents faster than we
can send (digital) audio data to (analog) output in phones using existing
threading/OS frameworks”

5. JOHN CARMACK – 20 YEARS AFTER DOOM
 Overdoing things beyond a point – will not make a difference to customers
 Ex, Geometric complexity – Very complex geometries are not going to improve games
 Audio output always gets to the listener’s ears. But depending on the viewer’s
eye movements, upto 90% of visual output can go waste
 While display resolutions scale to 4x to reach 4K resolutions, GPUs may not
scale 4x in performance, so GPU tricks are still needed

6. JOHN CARMACK – 20 YEARS AFTER DOOM
 Retina detection will be a key part of the VR sensor data flow
 Audio – HRTF and implementations may not make a big difference to current UX
in games
 MMOG will use the first VR applications
 Engineers need to solve problems, be it software or hardware. Hardware
engineering is difficult, but gives the material feel
 Facebook wants to reach a billion people with VR and new applications as part
of their vision
 … The acquisition happened very fast. Just a week after a meeting with Mark
Zuckerberg