I’m pleased to announce I recently started a full-time engineering position at Valve! I'll be working on various things, including VR (and Steam Frame)

After 2+ years in the robotics data space, we are shutting @Eidon_AI down. The thesis was right. But the business is brutally hard. We close this chapter by open-sourcing everything we built and sharing lessons for anyone venturing into the space.

People think the minions router being baller as a joke. But I have extensively tested it and it is one of the best possible Wifi 6E routers money can buy. Like someone at Illumination Studios was like "idk $80" and the router manufacturer was like gotchu fam.

As a CitraVR enjoyer, Valve hiring @fewerwrong to work on the Steam Frame is pretty sick. rushdownradio.net/valve-hire…

Feels good to finally be launched. For those curious, my focus was on the VR streaming, mostly on the dongle, and co-authoring our multi-link streaming. store.steampowered.com/hardw…

Steam Frame is here! Our wireless VR headset + controllers, available now in the following models: Steam Frame 256GB Steam Frame 1TB Sign up now and learn more on @Steam store.steampowered.com/hardw…

in all my years of doing neuroscience, I never thought we would end up here

Astra just harpooned my white whale. Full 6DOF tracking of PSVR2 controllers using a Leap Motion 1 camera attached to the base of my monitor.

Holy shit IT WORKS!! One shotted with GPT6 Astra I now have a fork of UEVR where I can play any UE game within a volumetric window! This actually renders the game in 3D - meaning, two real game cameras, not some depth map bullshit. Everything looks right This is an alternative (and more comfortable IMO) way to play most 2D->VR hacked games as there’s no motion sickness, and no need to redesign the UI and interaction systems Needs a lot more polish before I publish it but OMG IT WORKS!

Duane "Keffe D" Davis has been found guilty of first-degree murder in the killing of hip-hop legend Tupac Shakur. cnn.it/4qO1NZV

The first-ever PokémonXP was…pretty neat! I was expecting more chaos based on public reports, but all the lines I was involved in went pretty fast. That said, I got selected to stand in line for almost none of the things I signed up for.

The engineer who made this happen has a great story to tell!

I really enjoyed QuakeCon this year. I hope it continues. It’s just a really chill environment that things with “con” in their name don’t normally replicate. Getting to hear from all the Id founders was cool, I’m grateful they made such a big effort for the 30th. Can’t help but wonder if it’s because *they* also think it could be the last one.

Amanda Watson has joined Valve as a full-time engineer. She created CitraVR, a VR version of the Citra Nintendo 3DS emulator for Meta Quest. Best known for creating Air Link, Meta’s wireless PC VR feature for Quest headsets, She will work on several projects at Valve, including VR and the Steam Frame.

If you're single, Santa Cruz. If you're broke, Palo Alto. If you're retarded, San Francisco.

SideQuest: sidequestvr.com/app/29066/ci…

I spent 20 years architecting AAA game engines, going back to the PlayStation 1. I wrote all of that by hand. This one I did not. It is a stylized real time digital twin of the SF Bay Area, built from scratch in C++ and Vulkan. The geometry is real, the look is not. It is meant to read as a painted model of the Bay rather than a photo of it, because a photoreal copy of a place you can already see from a satellite is not worth building. The world is an 80 km square, about 6,400 km², and all of it is built from open data. USGS 3DEP 1 m lidar for the terrain. NOAA CoNED for the bay floor. USGS NHD for water. ESA WorldCover for land cover. OpenStreetMap for footprints and roads. That comes to 13 GB of streamed tiles, and 9.8 GB of it is terrain. Past the edge there is a 420 km coarse ring on Copernicus GLO-30, so the horizon does not end at a flat edge. Distant ridgelines bend down below it. There are 424,787 real building footprints in there, extruded procedurally, with heights off OSM tags and a plausibility gate that drops anything whose tagged height will not fit its own footprint. Across the whole 80 km box it rejects exactly 8 buildings, four of them towers carrying a bad height tag that used to extrude as needles over a derelict pier at Hunters Point. On top sit 41 landmarks at their real coordinates, authored by Fable as parametric Blender scripts rather than sculpted: Golden Gate, Transamerica, Coit, Sutro, Salesforce, the Ferry Building. Each one switches off the generated building underneath it. The simulation is the actual point. A 24 hour recording of real feeds plays back on a clock inside the app, at 1x up to 2000x. Caltrans PeMS for highway flow, 511 for Caltrain, OpenSky for flights, AIS for boats, METAR at SFO, OAK and SJC, and HRRR for weather. 165,356 samples across those 8 feeds. Cars spawn at the volume PeMS measured on that segment. Trains run the delays 511 reported. Planes fly the tracks OpenSky recorded. It is replay, not a live stream. Live polling is next and feeds the same clock, so it is a source swap rather than a rewrite. There is also a globe. You pick the Bay from orbit, fly down to the surface, and back out again. Reversed Z depth, HDR with a filmic tonemap, dual filter bloom, a time of day grade, and a volumetric marine layer for Karl the fog. AI agents write the issues, set the constraints, make the art direction calls, and review and validate every line of the roughly 235,000 lines of C++, GLSL, Python and PowerShell. What I built is the orchestration that holds it together, and the judgement on top of it: what to build, what to cut, and when to accept the result. The language choice is doing real work here. The hard part of AI written software is not producing the code. It is proving the code is right. C++ and Vulkan are unusually good at that, because nothing is hidden: every resource, every frame, every buffer you can read back. 28 golden image scenes compared by SSIM. An MCP server that drives the running app, so an agent can move the camera, set a sky preset, take a screenshot, and read the streaming counters back out. It validates against a live process instead of against its own diff. And a reviewer agent whose only job is to work out what the issue asked for before it reads the summary the PR wrote about itself. So I think C++ and Vulkan stay the heavy duty layer through the AI era. Not in spite of being low level. Because being performant, deterministic and checkable is exactly what an agent loop needs to push against. A managed engine hides the state that verification depends on. This is a hobby project, and it has nothing to do with my day job. Clips are below. More as I go. Map data © OpenStreetMap contributors (ODbL). Land cover: ESA WorldCover 2021 (CC BY 4.0). Terrain: USGS 3DEP and NOAA. Flight data: OpenSky Network. #Vulkan #cpp #gamedev #digitaltwin #OpenStreetMap

RT @jcoon1800: @gailalfaratx @Indian_Bronson @ID_AA_Carmack This will be hard to believe given how well @ID_AA_Carmack is known for providi…