It is insane to me that they ask that question in the title of the article and then go on to spoil the big first surprise.
“How do we talk to people about these games without spoiling it for them? Oh, I know I will spoil it for everybody who reads this article!!!
“It’s one of my favorite in the genre (maybe the best) and it requires a level of secrecy because it takes away the wow factor if you learn details about it early, but ANYWAYS here’s some details about it!!!!!!!!”
Website's a bit weird. The app icons highlight when you hover over them, but don't seem to do anything.
They've got a grab-bag of unrelated Linux etc. org icons - Nix, Debian, postmarketOS, Node, Kubernetes… You could argue that someone _could_ run Nix or Node on it, but Debian is just nerdbait. It's not relevant to the product they're selling, unless you're gonna wipe the disk and support it yourself.
The OS for it was entirely based on Debian stable. They recently switched to a fedora build. I think the whole idea is you can put any OS on it you want!
Looks rad, but I have a Legion Go which I can play any game I want and tinker on. This seems like it would be a worse version of that, but also not a useful phone replacement.
Pair-programming Nix with Gemini has taught me a lot about the assistive power of LLMs.
They're still slow and annoying at languages I'm good at. But it's really handy to be able to take one I'm not (like Nix or even C++) and say "write me a patch that does …" Applying a lot of the same thinking/structuring skills, but not tripping on the syntax.
I'm a lifelong Mac user, but a gaming handheld has gotten me into some of these topics. I dual-boot SteamOS and Windows.
On SteamOS, my 5.1 stereo just works.
On Windows, apparently there was some software package called DTS Live (and/or Dolby Live) needed to wrap the audio stream in a container that the stereo understands. There was a time when there was a patent pool on the AC-3 codec (or something like that - I'm handwaving because I don't know all the details). So Microsoft stopped licensing the patent, and now you just can't use AC-3 on Windows. I spent an evening installing something called Virtual CABLE and trying to use it to juryrig my own Dolby Live encoder with ffmpeg… Never got it to work.
It's easy to fall deep into the tinkerhole on Linux, which has kept me away for a long time, but as mainstream platforms get more locked down, or stop supporting things they decide should be obsolete, it's nice to have a refuge where you're still in control, and things still work.
(Insert meme about the Windows API in Proton being a more stable target than actual Windows.)
What was fun for me was the fact that when this thing came out everybody I knew thought it worked by shooting red lasers at your eyes. There was very little internet to use to look it up either so I was shocked when this video showed how it really worked.
Wow, that was awesome. They had to crank up the FPS of the high-speed camera into the millions of FPS to see that brightness control over every individual LED was done by flashing it multiple times per scanline. Very cool.
Unfortunately you can't get the LEDs any more - they were originally from LED printers and those all now use infrared LED arrays. I'm actually working on something similar, and am even using a few VB scanner mechs in development (driven by a raspberry Pi).
For further background, they were developed from an earlier system called the "Private Eye" - still a few references to them on the web e.g. [0]. I've built a circuit to drive one from a Pi Zero - amazing gadgets for 90's tech.
I tried a virtual boy the first time some months ago. I was super impressed with the quality of the graphics. I've used a Quest 3 and a Vision Pro and obviously these are very different beasts, but its just impressive that in terms of sharpness, this 90s device felt as good.
A question for the mech engineers: why the back and forth wobble? My first thought when I saw that mechanism was "that sounds harder than it should be. Wouldn't a spinning 6 sided mirror work better?"
A spinning mirror is certainly an option, there are many projects around using them as projectors e.g. [0]. It would need precision faces and be a larger volume than the flapping mirror approach. Because the mirrors are spring-mounted and designed to resonate at ~50Hz they actually take very little power to drive - there's an optosensor on the back used to stabilise the oscillation amplitude, which is why the VB and Private Eye display widths vary during startup.
Can't see the video from this location, so may be just restarting stuff in it.
I'd guess a 6-sided mirror would be too big. The mirror needs a certain width for its reflection range to span across the viewport, and so a hexagon of that side length would be too big, particularly considering both eyes (the hexagons would have to overlap across the center line.)
Another problem would be that 60º between sides is too little angular separation. When the current frame approaches the right edge of your vision field, the next side of the mirror is already in position to be reflecting the LEDs into the left side of the vision field.
A 2-sided rotating mirror might work, but that's more complicated to manufacture and mount, such that I'd guess they found the back-and-forth simpler. Or else they found that rotating mirrors would impose a torque on the whole device and that wasn't workable. You could rotate the two mirrors in opposite directions, but that would mean the viewports are scanning in opposite directions (one right-to-left), and I don't know what that would do for the perceptions of 3d and persistence-of-vision.
What are the games you're recommending?
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