Oculus Share

There is a recent video up of an interview by Engadget  with Oculus VR’s Palmer Luckey and Nate Mitchell talking about Oculus Share.  13 minutes.

It seems the task of sharing has come up for the Oculus developers. Consider. Have you thought of how often we take screen captures to share with others? How would you do that while using the Rift?

There is also the challenge of how will you use stores, find Rift games… all the basic tasks, in and out of game, we perform when preparing to, playing, exploring, and sharing games. This will apparently some like KOINUP, but for Rift users and developers. 

At 9 minutes in they are discussing mobile device game playing. They touch on one of the points in physics that is limiting the power of mobile devices; thermal mass.

To understand the concept you need to bring together some things you already know. In simplified terms: temperature is a measure of the heat in an object. Heat is the kinetic energy(motion) of the atoms or molecules of a substance. It is about how fast they are vibrating or moving.

Electricity is about moving electrons through materials. Electrical resistance is about how hard it is to push/pull the electrons through a material. As electrons bump into atoms and molecules they lose forward momentum and that energy of motion is imparted to the atom or molecule. Think of a cue ball hitting the pool balls on a table. Similar. The increased motion of the balls is like increased heat in materials.

For computers to work we move lots of elections around very quickly. That produces heat in the computer and thus the cooling fans.

To remove heat we use heat exchangers. If you have opened a desktop computer’s case you have seen the CPU cooling fan and heat sink. The heat sink is the block of aluminum or copper fins that channels air from the fan. With more surface area (thus fins) more heat that can be moved. In other word the more slow moving pool balls you put on the table the faster you stop fast moving balls.

For a game we need to move lots of electrons. We need cooling. You cannot fit a cooling fan and heat sink like we see in a desktop into a phone. Thus the physics limit on small devices.

We get smaller more powerful devices by learning how to make more efficient devices that generate less heat but accomplish the same work. With less heat we can use smaller fans and heat sinks and at some point omit them completely. So, advancing the computing power in phones is going to take some time.

At about 11 minutes in they are talking about whether Oculus will be developing games.

At about 12 minutes in they talk about Oculus ETA. No date. But months not years. I am still expecting summer 2014.

On a side note, the LEAP Motion controller has gone retail. Best Buy or LEAP Store.

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