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Monthly Update: 2017.11.30

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George Singer edited this page Mar 23, 2018 · 1 revision

Here’s what we accomplished last month with Simula, as well as what we plan to accomplish next month. If you’re new to this list, or need a refresher of what Simula is about, see the links at the bottom of this email for an explanation of the idea.

As always: Send us feedback. Send us questions. Send us contributors. :]

1 Progress this month: +1 BMVP

Last month we finished a *B*are *M*inimum *V*iable *P*roduct for Simula. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=EvZLols0_lc&feature=youtu.be of it in action which showcases the milestones we crossed:

  1. Stereoscopic rendering. One (slightly different) image for each eye is rendered to the Vive at 45 FPS, creating the stereoscopic VR illusion.
  2. HMD orientation & positional tracking. Head positional and rotational movement is fully tracked.
  3. Full controller tracking. HTC Vive controllers show up in Simula with full movement tracking (orientation + positional). They are rendered using the stock Valve models, but have a texturing bug which needs fixed (this might be evident in the YouTube video above).

All of this is due to David Kraeutmann, whose technical decisions this month involved switching our OSVR dependency completely to OpenVR/Valve, adding Vulkan to our backend, and getting past a broken C API with direct C++ Haskell bindings. Zac Slade also helped tidy up the new changes into a cleaner master branch.

2 Goals for next month

2.1 Distribution Goals

Show Simula to beta testers. Last summer Trey compiled a list of people from reddit who were interested in trying out Simula. We plan on showing them (and others) what we have. This is the most important thing to do this month. Streamline onboarding process. The onboarding processs should be streamlined more to make (1) as easy as possible. This means improving the documentation and installation procedures. Update Aurora with our progress. I plan on emailing the CEO of Aurora with our BMVP milestone. Earlier this summer we talked with Aurora about collaborating on something like a Linux VR OS. This is important since the ultimate goal of something like Simula is for it to run standalone on the headsets of the future.

2.1.1 The only metric that matters

The only metric that matters, in the medium-run, is the number of people using Simula for more than 1 hour per day. Right now we’re at 0. Everything we do from now until next month can be interpreted as an attempt to get that number from 0 to 1.

0 ↦ 1

If we can start a growth curve and grow it by something like 10% week over week, then our chances of attracting funding to the project goes up tremendously.

2.2 Engineering Goals (Tentative)

Here are the remaining engineering tasks for Simula this month. These are subject to change depending on the feedback we receive for our existing prototype.

  1. Controller Point Clicking. Rays should extend from at least one Vive controller into space such that a ray pointed onto a window surface projects a mouse pointer onto the window surface. Squeezing the Vive trigger should invoke a Wayland mouse click event.
  2. Controller-Grabable Windows. Squeezing one of a Vive controller’s grab buttons (which is just one button internally) while its controller mesh is intersected with a window surface places the window surface in a “grab state”, such that its orientation and position in 3-space is tracked by the Vive controller’s orientation and position, until the pressed grab button (or buttons) is released.
  3. Fix Vive Controller Texture Issues. The texturing bug with the Vive controllers should be fixed.

3 Resources & Explanation of the Idea

  • Simula GitHub Page.
  • The Case for VR Desktop. This is an old article we sent to friends to explain why VR Desktop for Linux is a good idea.
  • Simula MVP Spec. This is a checklist of features remaining which we feel are very likely to be implemented over the coming weeks.
  • YC Application. Here you can see our rejected YC W18 application. It is unlikely we will be able to receive funding for this project until we have a growth curve.
  • Updated Probabilities. This a list of things that need to be true in order for this project to succeed, and our best estimate for how likely they are being true right now. All feedback that we get get is incorporated into these probabilities. Many major technical decisions will be placed in here as well (to keep everything transparent for contributors).
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