The graphics card issue is not that relevant, Gear VR with a mobile GPU is showing that it's not really about some arbitrary graphical fidelity bar. Yes, some of the highest fidelity cool stuff will be on PC but multiple cards won't be required. Both the Vive and CV1 will run great on one high end card, and by the time they upgrade to ~4k/120Hz... they'll still require just 1 card.

Plus many of his specific points are just so temporary in nature, like resolution complaints, heaviness/comfort, tethered, form factor, etc. These will be solved in just the next few years.

It's parts of your lower brain aligning to convince you you're in a virtual world, and while it is a spectrum you really need a high end headset to experience it. Abrash himself mainly dismissed VR's potential prior to experiencing it.

But you'll get a chance to try to presence-inducing stuff in the next ~6 months with the consumer release of the Vive and Oculus CV1.

While there are hassles of VR with Android that were only solved by making deep changes to Android, the hassles of PC are greater. And this is a phone accessory that is specifically not designed for changing hardware and software: it only works with the Note 4 running a custom optimized version of Android. But they do agree with you that a dedicated unit is what they want to do as well which is why this is not their own consumer unit.

Comments URL: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=8201094

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Douglas Lanman, the researcher behind this technology work at Nvidia was hired a few months ago by Oculus VR.

I'm hopeful 1440p will be fairly text friendly and prove good-enough for programming, etc. but even if not quite there, that merely means that threshold will be broken a year or two down the line.

Of course by disaster I meant just relative to other classes, with a much higher amount of team splits/zombies in such a short period, which seemed predictable. Most startups don't work out, that's expected, but the stage was weighed for things not to work out in re: the startup itself and the friendships involved. Who knows, perhaps you and your friends, with a shared, good idea would have done great in w13, having the right context to build upon where you were at. I know of other teams who were extremely frustrated that something they've dreamed about, Demo Day, turn into something to dread and the quite painfully choosing to give up on the whole endeavor whatever the high personal costs (not necessarily wrongly).

One of the best things about pg's essay was the core message to entrepreneurs that a good startup idea requires not a pressure cooker atmosphere to come up with an 'idea' but the natural space in which you notice a problem that can be solved. It's the starting point, not something that can be tacked on later like the noidea concept would suggest.

I read the post S12 (post noidea) essay (http://www.paulgraham.com/startupideas.html) as a (if unacknowledged) reaction of someone trying to understand and elucidate why ideas are actually very important (going against the common refrain that 'execution' is all that matters) after having recently seen poor ideas get by a selective process.