Carmack accused of stealing Zenimax's tech for Oculus VR

[Unkillable Cat]

While the judge didn't issue a ruling following the hearing, he urged both parties to reach a settlement instead of risking a big decision that he said could come down hard against either side rather than "splitting the baby." The judge said he would likely "resolve the heck out of [this] big, hairy fight" sooner rather than later, according to Law360. So absent a settlement, we expect a ruling could come any day.

Am I a bad man for wishing ZeniMax to be taken down hard by this judge?

 

[Wirdschowerdn]

Oy yoyoy another little $500m encore can never hurt.

 

[Wirdschowerdn]

http://www.pcgamer.com/john-carmack-the-power-of-the-pc-will-never-get-to-mobile/

John Carmack: the power of the PC will never get to mobile

By Tuan Nguyen 2 days ago

But mobile needs to come first for VR to truly take off on the PC.

John Carmack took the stage today at Oculus Connect to talk about how developers are not doing a good job with developing for VR. Carmack told the audience of developers that the content industry is generally lazy, waiting for powerful hardware. but the mainstream doesn't rely on powerful expensive CPUs.

"I would rather have magic software over magic hardware," said Carmack, referring to how many game developers always look toward the next generation GPU from AMD or Nvidia, but in fact should work on tuning their software and games for lower-end hardware.

To push virtual reality into the mainstream, and then have the high-end put more resources to the platform, Carmack indicated that the industry needs to focus more on mainstream hardware, specifically mobile. This strategy, said Carmack, allows the entire industry to move forward since mobile is where the rest of the tech industry is focused.

Carmack said that although the phone doesn't have the raw power of a desktop, it forces developers to be better programmers, and that if they don't have the skills that he has, to "go out and find it."

"The power of the PC will never get to the mobile platform," Carmack said, indicating that the PC will remain the dominant gaming platform, but it needs to come second to mobile.

I don't care about VR and other gadgets, but he got a good point about game developers being lazy and releasing unoptimized shit. This entire industry is just a hardware-sponsored racket.

 

[abija]

More like the guys that should optimize shit have almost no power of decision.

 

[Dexter]

That's not exactly what he said, although I generally disagree with him on Mobile VR and find it sad that he's wasting so much of his time on it:

This entire industry is just a hardware-sponsored racket.

Also this is the most retarded part of your post. Not only is it retarded because it doesn't make any sense and nobody forces you to buy new hardware (It's actually kind of sad how Upgrade cycles have grown from ~2 years to like 5-10 nowadays). But even if it was true it wouldn't be a bad thing, if you do it for gaming you can think of it like subsidizing technological advancement in more important fields like medical science, education, astronautics, architecture, engineering, super-computing or construction down the line with your entertainment dollars that couldn't be financed any other way.

 

[IHaveHugeNick]

Nobody forces anyone to buy new Hardware, but if you do it for gaming you can think of it like subsidizing technological advancement in more important fields like medicine, astronautics or construction with your entertainment that couldn't be financed any other way.

This is quite possibly the dumbest post I have ever read around here. Do you actually think off-the-shelf PC gaming hardware is the height of computer technology?

 

[Dexter]

This is quite possibly the dumbest post I have ever read around here. Do you actually think off-the-shelf PC gaming hardware is the height of computer technology?

PC gaming (and to a lesser extent console gaming) has been pushing hardware advancements, especially in the GPU and graphical department forward by immense amounts since the late 90s and is now a $100 billion industry.

Do you really think CAD development, fringe medical research or simple Office applications would have the economy of scale required to push this sector forward this fast? We can talk about improvements in CPU power and multicore parallelization, since they're important in many other industries, although I think gaming was a major force in pushing that forward too, especially during the early to late 90s and early 00s, but there's absolutely no argument that you can make that it isn't so with GPU and graphical/rendering improvements.

As we are getting into the VR/AR age, the main hardware, tools and skillsets required for many other industries that want to enter it are that of game development, also many times using classic game development tools like Unity or Unreal and without the development and requirement in high end gaming even these fields wouldn't be anywhere they are today: https://medium.com/@VRSalon/disrupt-top-ten-industries-vr-will-radically-change-f156cb806e74

 

[Wirdschowerdn]

Nobody forces anyone to buy new Hardware, but if you do it for gaming you can think of it like subsidizing technological advancement in more important fields like medicine, astronautics or construction with your entertainment that couldn't be financed any other way.

This is quite possibly the dumbest post I have ever read around here. Do you actually think off-the-shelf PC gaming hardware is the height of computer technology?

Learn to quote buddy. I didn't say that.

 

[IHaveHugeNick]

Do you really think CAD development, fringe medical research or simple Office applications would have the economy of scale required to push this sector forward this fast?

Do you fucking even realize how high are the prices of top of the line medical equipment and how much funding and research goes into it? They get the best and newest tech, and they get it sometimes many years before it hits commercial consumer markets, and years before anyone even thinks it could be used for gaming.

Sweeet fucking Christ, "gamurs" fantasizing about how they subsidize modern medicine by buying and playing animu dating sims. Somebody hold me.

 

[Dexter]

Do you really think CAD development, fringe medical research or simple Office applications would have the economy of scale required to push this sector forward this fast?

Do you fucking even realize how high are the prices of top of the line medical equipment and how much funding and research goes into it? They get the best and newest tech, and they get it sometimes many years before it hits commercial consumer markets, and years before anyone even thinks it could be used for gaming.

Sweeet fucking Christ, "gamurs" fantasizing about how they subsidize modern medicine by buying and playing animu dating sims. Somebody hold me.

Are you retarded? Who the fuck is talking about "medical equipment" and how does that feature into gaming and improvement of 3D hardware? Now if you'd refer to things like Medical Visualization, Simulation and Imaging and everything that requires them maybe you'd actually get close to understanding my point. Selling a few hundreds, thousands or even tens of thousands of specialized machines, even at very high prices doesn't add up to the kind of funding needed to push a field like 3D graphics forward. Neither 3dfx, ATI or nVidia could have made the kind of money required to advance the hardware and software side of things to where it is today by simply selling to the medical industry or CAD and similar. Neither of those industries can provide the economy of scale required for fast technological progress even at a high premium. Your hypothesis could as well be that such specialized fields could have developed light flat-screen high resolution color displays required for medical imaging by their own without the economy of scale provided by people watching TV for the past dozen decades and improvements of TV technology and then the increase of resolution of both computer monitors and their miniaturization for mobile/tablet screens in the private and entertainment sector and it would sound equally retarded. Some things need a broad influx of consumer cash for fast technological development and to become a lot cheaper and more affordable, 3D graphics and visualization are one of those things that wouldn't be anywhere they are today without the cash infusion gaming and 3D engines provided from the entertainment market (and to a lesser degree movie CGI): https://www.siemens.com/innovation/...well-being/medical-imaging-cinematic-vrt.html http://www.nvidia.com/object/medical_imaging.html

VR/AR are also technological fields that will be very helpful when it comes to things like preparing complex operations or trying to figure out ways to get to blockages in blood vessels or similar in the future, since an actual 3D mapping of a body and internal organ scanned and displayed in a 3D engine is a lot more precise and can provide a much better impression of the situation than 2D images. And these fields wouldn't be anywhere near the stage they are today (the tech was in a Virtual limbo and languished there since the early 90s with only select few research institutions buying very expensive gear for experimentation or bothering to innovate) without the success of both the mobile ("people just messing around with shitty apps") and gaming markets and a viable consumer path for them into the future (for now mostly composed of gaming and media consumption): http://edition.cnn.com/2016/01/07/health/google-cardboard-baby-saved/index.html

 

[Haba]

Do you fucking even realize how high are the prices of top of the line medical equipment and how much funding and research goes into it? They get the best and newest tech, and they get it sometimes many years before it hits commercial consumer markets, and years before anyone even thinks it could be used for gaming.

Are you seriously insinuating that highly specialized top-of-the-line professional products are the true drivers of innovation?

My corporation sells to large hospitals and armies. I know the buying cycles there. Sure, they may be buying solutions that have that is prohibitively expensive for the consumer market. But do they replace their "outdated" tech every year?

You upgrade your smartphone every year. Meanwhile military issue communication tech can be decades old. Or then they just use robust versions of consumer products.

Take this, for example. Full resolution VR:

https://www.engadget.com/2017/06/19/varjo-promises-a-vr-headset-with-human-eye-resolution/
https://www.theverge.com/2017/6/19/15820336/nokia-varjo-virtual-reality-headset-microsoft

The end product will be priced in thousands of euros. Meanwhile Oculus tries to push their price as low as they can.

Which approach will have more impact on VR development as a whole?

 

[Perkel]

Do you fucking even realize how high are the prices of top of the line medical equipment and how much funding and research goes into it? They get the best and newest tech, and they get it sometimes many years before it hits commercial consumer markets, and years before anyone even thinks it could be used for gaming.

Tech isn't one way street.

professional VR/AR existed way back before Palmer went on KS to make cheap one.

In fact whole point of Palmer going to Kickstarter was to reverse thinking about VR which was at the time prof equipment for couple thousands bucks. Instead of like prof VR focus on hardware itself and use very expensive lenses he used cheap fish eye lenses and focused on software to bend image to fit those lenses and instead of custom made screens used cheap phone ones because phone screens thanks to consumer products (instead of proff business) got really good and cheap.

Thanks to this you have cheap VR that isn't really that far away from professional VR headsets which before went for couple thousands dollars usually made for one application or something.

So yes your animu hentai games in VR will actually drive more innovation than any proffesional business can.

 

[IHaveHugeNick]

Do you fucking even realize how high are the prices of top of the line medical equipment and how much funding and research goes into it? They get the best and newest tech, and they get it sometimes many years before it hits commercial consumer markets, and years before anyone even thinks it could be used for gaming.

Are you seriously insinuating that highly specialized top-of-the-line professional products are the true drivers of innovation?

My corporation sells to large hospitals and armies. I know the buying cycles there. Sure, they may be buying solutions that have that is prohibitively expensive for the consumer market. But do they replace their "outdated" tech every year?

They don't have to replace it every year. Precisely because businesses are in it for the long-term, they are willing to pay premium when they decide to replace. And thus they subsidize most of the the development for the high-end technology. They're the only ones that can susidizze it, because at that point it's too expensive for mass market. Once the tech establishes itself firmly in the professional world, it drips down to the consumer devices.

Of course driving the prices down for consumer also requires an innovation, but there's a difference between inventing a new type of screen, and trying to find ways to make it cheaper.

Take this, for example. Full resolution VR:

https://www.engadget.com/2017/06/19/varjo-promises-a-vr-headset-with-human-eye-resolution/
https://www.theverge.com/2017/6/19/15820336/nokia-varjo-virtual-reality-headset-microsoft

The end product will be priced in thousands of euros. Meanwhile Oculus tries to push their price as low as they can.

Which approach will have more impact on VR development as a whole?

HoloLens will have more impact on the technological development, because it's a far more advanced device. It's not even a contest either, Oculus is absolutely primitive in comparison. Oculus is just a virtual reality headset. HoloLens is a virtual reality headset, a fully Independent PC, with a built-in Kinect, operating wirelessly from a helmet on top of your head. Let that sink in. There's a reason why the costs are in 5000-10000$ range, and why businesses are still willing to buy and try it.

Of course this is Microsoft we are talking about, so they will spend 20 billion on the development, only to be beaten to the market by someone else in the last minute. But from purely technological perspective, that shit is next level.

 

[Morkar Left]

It makes perfect sense to focus on mobile phones. Hardware can only be successfull when the majority of the consumerbase has easy - or least reasonable - access to it. Mobile phones are affordable for everyone nowadays and even every 3rd worlder refugee has one by now.

 

[Dexter]

Precisely because businesses are in it for the long-term, they are willing to pay premium when they decide to replace. And thus they subsidize most of the the development for the high-end technology. They're the only ones that can susidizze it, because at that point it's too expensive for mass market. Once the tech establishes itself firmly in the professional world, it drips down to the consumer devices.

Of course driving the prices down for consumer also requires an innovation, but there's a difference between inventing a new type of screen, and trying to find ways to make it cheaper.

Look up "economies of scale" and realize that no company would develop very expensive new display technologies like say OLED for specific niche business interests that cost billions of $ in R&D without having an economy of scale behind them required for quick progress & innovation (mobile phone/tablet users, TV viewers etc.) able to recoup said costs from (this is also why the dedicated computer monitor market doesn't have that much innovation nowadays, since it isn't generally considered a growth leader): https://www.oled-info.com/dscc-updates-their-oled-forecasts-sees-over-60-billion-revenues-2022

The same can be said for other things like miniaturization, although the need for things like server farms/data centers and similar is a lot bigger and also has an influence from big business (though this also raises by consumer demand), things like consumer CPU/GPU manufacturing and especially mobile devices by the likes of Samsung and Apple are big drivers in miniaturization and adoption of more efficient processes:

As such the companies driving the miniaturization of semiconductors and are able to push billions of $ into it are the ones that benefit from economies of scale the most especially in the mobile, general computing and data center sectors:

HoloLens will have more impact on the technological development, because it's a far more advanced device. It's not even a contest either, Oculus is absolutely primitive in comparison. Oculus is just a virtual reality headset. HoloLens is a virtual reality headset, a fully Independent PC, with a built-in Kinect, operating wirelessly from a helmet on top of your head. Let that sink in. There's a reason why the costs are in 5000-10000$ range, and why businesses are still willing to buy and try it.

Of course this is Microsoft we are talking about, so they will spend 20 billion on the development, only to be beaten to the market by someone else in the last minute. But from purely technological perspective, that shit is next level.

The HoloLens is most decidedly not a "virtual reality headset", doesn't have a compelling consumer use-case yet and as you rightly stated is outside of the reach of most consumers hands ($3000, not $10000), as such unless they can manage to improve the tech (it displays everything as a 35° Overlay that looks like a postage stamp in front of your head), price and form factor it'll have a much longer road to adoption and development, since it can't be subsidized by an economy of scale and consumers as is. You might have noticed that Microsoft came out with cheap Virtual Reality headsets partnered with many different manufacturers instead: https://www.microsoft.com/en-us/store/collections/vrandmixedrealityheadsets

 

[LESS T_T]

50% off sale: https://www.gamesindustry.biz/artic...s-usd500m-win-in-facebook-oculus-legal-battle

US Judge halves ZeniMax's $500m win in Facebook Oculus legal battle
Also denies Bethesda parent's request for sales ban on Rift headsets

The ongoing battle between Facebook and ZeniMax Media continues as a US District Judge has revised the terms of the latter's earlier's win.

Back in February 2017, ZeniMax was awarded $500 million by a jury in Dallas, Texas but judge Ed Kinkeade has now ruled that the firm will receive $250 million, Bloomberg reports. The bulk of this - $200 million - is for breach of contract, while the other $50 million is for copyright infringement.

The case centres around a lawsuit filed by ZeniMax back in May 2014 - just a couple of months after Facebook acquired Oculus for $2 billion. The firm claimed Oculus stole trade secrets to create its Rift virtual reality headset, alleging that Palmer Luckey, former id Software exec John Carmack and other former ZeniMax employees reverse engineered research and copyrighted code for the project.

Oculus argued that this copyright infringement wasn't "substantial" enough to warrant the original $500 million, claiming that just seven lines of Oculus code had been copied from ZeniMax "out of approximately 42 billion lines".

Kinkeade seems to have agreed, dropping $250 million of the jury's proposed award for ZeniMax, as well as the damages specifically against Luckey and fellow Oculus co-founder Brendan Iribe.

A few months after the original verdict, ZeniMax then pushed for Kinkeade to rule that Rift devices should be removed from sale. Oculus argued that this would place unfair hardship on the company, particularly as ZeniMax has no rival product that is suffering because of the Rift's availability, and Kinkeade ruled that there would be no ban.

In a statement, ZeniMax expressed pleasure at its $250 million win, but disappointment that this was half the original figure. It is reportedly considering its next step.

"Based on strong evidentiary record, the jury in this case found that ZeniMax was seriously harmed by the defendants' theft of ZeniMax's breakthrough VR technology and its verdict reflected that harm."

Facebook vice president and deputy general counsel Paul Grewal said: "We've said from day one the ZeniMax case is deeply flawed, and today the court agreed. Our commitment to Oculus is unwavering and we will continue to invest in building the future of VR."

 

[Unkillable Cat]

"Based on strong evidentiary record, the jury in this case found that ZeniMax was seriously harmed by the defendants' theft of ZeniMax's breakthrough VR technology and its verdict reflected that harm."

 

[Wirdschowerdn]

$250m is still a lot of dough. They could use that money to acquire Obsidian including that new Tim/Leon IP, fire Ferg, re-install MCA as Creative Director and let him make a new Fallout game.

But they won't.

 

[Infinitron]

https://uploadvr.com/carmack-sues-zenimax/
http://archive.is/DgIXR

Oculus CTO John Carmack Sues ZeniMax For $22.5 Million In Ongoing Battle