Skip to content

Monthly Update: 2017.12.31

Jump to bottom
George Singer edited this page Jan 29, 2018 · 2 revisions

Table of Contents

  1. Progress this month
    1. Engineering Progress
    2. Alpha Testers & New Contributors
    3. User Feedback
      1. Feature Requests
      2. How people want to use Simula
  2. Goals for January
  3. Special Thanks
  4. Resources & Explanation of the Idea

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. Simula is currently looking for feedback, contributors, and alpha testers. Email me back if you're interested: george.w.singer@gmail.com.

Progress this month

Engineering Progress

Thanks to David Kraeutmann, Simula has moved from BMVP to MVP status. This includes the following engineering milestones:

  1. All Linux apps are now compatible with Simula. Now both X apps and Wayland apps are compatible with Simula. This means you can load up Simula and work with a browser and several terminals.

  2. Controller-grabable, resizable windows. Vive controllers can now grab windows and move them around; grabbing a window with two controllers allows the window to naturally expand and contract in size. Currently, windows cannot be twisted, but this should be fixed by next month's iteration cycle.

  3. Controller point clicking (buggy). Vive controllers can now be used as mouse pointers.

You can see a link to Simula's current engineering specification here; the spec also includes a list of features requested by alpha testers (see below).

Alpha Testers & New Contributors

This month Simula picked up 5 alpha testers, including Taylor Ellington, Josiah Niedrauer, and Christoph Haag. You can see an unorganized google spreadsheet of user correspondences here.

Only 1 in 5 alpha testers could get Simula to run on their hardware. Simula was developed on machines running nvidia graphics cards. Unfortunately, 4 out of 5 of the alpha testers use AMD cards and received Vulkan related errors after trying to launch. (So far, the current version of Simula has only been confirmed to work on nvidia GPUs running on Ubuntu 17.10).

Taylor Ellington has joined the development team. One of the alpha testers (Taylor Ellington) who couldn't get Simula working has volunteered to look into the AMD/Vulkan issues this month. He also helped provide feedback for what he's looking for in Simula (see below).

User Feedback

Feature Requests

Hardware issues notwithstanding, we still received quite a bit of feedback regarding Simula's current feature suite. This feedback is temporarily parked in Simula's engineering spec, much of which is re-pasted below. We have already finished the first two of these requests:

  1. Window manipulation. The ability to freely move windows around in VR space was the first feature request we received:

    is there a way for me to move windows around?

    and

    what i'd like to see eventually is the ability to move windows around, resize them, switch focus between windows, (ideally with steamVR controllers as the input)

  2. Changed Background Color. We changed the background color away from pure white to a less distracting shade of darker gray:

    [Simula needs] a less distracting background than pure white

  3. Installation Tools. Simula's build system still needs improvement:

    I need the ability to run a utility that verifies that I have my environment configured correctly for simulavr, so that I can determine if an error is coming from simula or from issues in my environment

    As Evidenced By: a tool that checks versions, install locations, runs tests, and otherwise verifies the "correctness" of a simula install, as well as explicitly calling out things that are wrong

  4. Window alignment. One person requested an easy way to align windows on a plane:

    [I would like to be able to] set a 2d projection plane for all windows, similar to virtualdesktop. or at least the ability to align all windows on the same plane without dragging them manually

  5. Mouse & Keyboard Visibility. The ability to see your physical input devices (in particular: your everyday mouse and keyboard) is important:

    with current technology, keyboard + controllers is ideal. eventually i want to be able to see a mouse and keyboard in VR. once that is possible, the ideal input would be mouse + keyboard

    to me, [activating the Vive's webcam when you tilt your head downward so that you can see your keyboard and mouse] would be a pretty killer feature. not quite [as good as seeing your keyboard and mouse virtually] but so much better than nothing

  6. Environments. The ability to modify Simula environments was requested:

    I would like to be able to configure and decorate my simulavr desktop space with images, audio effects, 3D models, and other cosmetic items, so that I can make the space feel and look the way I want.

    As Evidenced By: Menu's and options to import assets and bind them to locations in the 3d VR environment, color change settings for the background color, and the ability to manipulate all of these from inside a running simulavr instance. – Talyor Ellington

  7. Performance Improvements & Monitoring. Both improvements to Simula's performance and a way to monitor and benchmark Simula's framerate were requested:

    I would SimulaVR to perform well, averaging at least 30 frames a second, so that I can use it as a true desktop replacement with out suffering from exaggerated nausea or poor user experience.

    As Evidenced By: FPS count under different loads such as watching video, editing text, running multiple chrome tabs.

How people want to use Simula

We also polled some alpha testers about how they envisioned ultimately using Simula. Here are two of the answers we got:

I would really love to see what new development tools become possible when given the right environment. SteamVR is a step in that direction for consumers, but a VR-first linux distro could really open up the “creative gates” for producers of all types. The first thing I felt when I put on the Vive was “wow, I wish I could run Blender in here.” I don’t think there would be any better way to do 3d modeling than in a 3d environment. It would become much more about sculpture and model-making - like the old days! As a developer I would love to be involved in writing those kinds of initial apps but I’m even more excited about using them myself.

Another great use case is in graphical programming. There have been a lot of takes on graphical languages (labview for example) but they’re all rather clunky. I think moving in 3 dimensions would help.

– Schell Scivalli

and

with current gen resolution, i would mostly be limited to watching movies. once resolution starts to move higher, i want to be able to browse the web, work in a terminal, etc. basically everything i do on a pancake display right now

my normal pancake workflow is i3wm, with a web browser on one display, irc/slack/hipchat on another display, and a bunch of terminal tiles on all my other displays. the way i envision this, i want to translate the same workflow into VR and have a web browser, and then be able to span window tiles all around, like an infinite number of pancake displays

obviously that's long term. short term, i want to be able to project at least one window to an arbitrary plane and be able to drag it around,

– Josiah Niedrauer

Goals for January

High level:

  1. The primary goal for Simula continues to be getting the number of people using it for more than 1hr/day from zero to one.
  2. Until we get growth curve, our ability to attract external funding remains unfeasible.
  3. User depth is more important to us than user breadth, in the sense that deepening our relationship with existing alpha testers should be prioritized over increasing the denominator of new users.

With this in mind, the top deliverables for this month are tentatively rank-ordered as follows:

  1. MVP Items Completed (David Krautmann). The crucial MVP items remaining from our project spec should be completed. This increases the chances existing alpha testers will get enough value from Simula to want to use it for more than 1hr/day.
  2. AMD Vulkan Fix (Taylor Ellington). Taylor has volunteered to help fix the AMD issue, which prevented him and 3 other alpha testers from being able to run Simula this month. Fixing this issue will allow us to follow through for the people who attempted and failed to get Simula working last month.
  3. +5 Alpha (Re)Testers (George Singer). I plan to continue talking to alpha testers to ensure Simula has a proper feedback loop. This means at least 5 more people should attempt to run (or re-run) Simula this month.
  4. Installation Issues (George Singer). Several of the alpha testers had to install Ubuntu 17.10 from scratch (instead of using, i.e., Arch) to give Simula a shot. I plan to get Simula 1-step installable for Ubuntu and Arch (preferably with nix).

David Kraeutmann is also looking into the possibility of getting a proper rendering engine for Simula. This could decrease the iteration times for future feature releases.

Special Thanks

I'd like to give a special thanks to Christoph Haag, Zac Slade, sn0w75, and other people in Simula chat who have provided ongoing support for the project. Soon we will have something we can all start using ourselves. :]

Resources & Explanation of the Idea

Clone this wiki locally