Anybody considering picking up an Oculus Rift..?


After trying my Brother's newly arrived Oculus rift, I have to say it's a lot better than I thought it would be. The games that seem to be designed for it work well, also tried VR versions of Doom and Duke 3D and it was amazingly effective as well, although not quite as good as games designed specifically for VR. I can imagine some neat applications when the touch controllers come out.
 
I suddenly have absolutely no qualms about their mistake in sending me a Rift. I originally backed them based on a number of very specific ideals and promises, all of which they've now completely reversed. Betrayal would be a pretty fitting word here.
 
So, what are the experiences with the Facebook Rift so far and does somebody have one of the alternatives and is any of all this compatible with Linux by now?

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*dorkdork*
 
So this is an interesting thought provoking situation. I work under the knowledge of; things I create on work time during work hours, with work resources belongs to the company I work for.

But do they own the ideas thought up during duty hours as well? If I write a line of code at work, when I go back home and write a similar line of code, am I effectively plagiarizing the company I work for? Can I sell a company I single highhandedly wrote software for, then go off and try to create something of my own. Could the purchaser of the company come after me for reusing some of that code style in a new completely unrelated project?

I've always wondered about this, I have certain privileges and access and knowledge of things that they might consider me a risk if I were to go work for a foreign government. I think there's even a time-frame in which I have to wait before freelancing to other entities because of that.

The owner could claim anything they want obviously, and it's up to them to prove without a reasonable doubt that plagiarizing and theft had occurred. However, intellectual property in the form of code writing becomes very tricky indeed. Especially to a jury of possibly uneducated individuals. Sometimes the best way to do something logical is the way it's done, and to an outside observer not aware of that could say, yea, that's basically a copy. I do things in a certain way, I'm not sure I would go out of my way to do the same thing I know produced a solid result in a different way just because I know I used something that used a portion of that method in the past.

Now I would put money that something similar happened here. Carmack modifying the ID source engine to allow for VR in doom 3, him going on to use some of those same methods, and maybe even some of the same tools to create some of the SDK for the occulus to use. How do you say, no, you can't use the tool you wrote yourself to do something for anyone else?
 
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this is one of the reasons i don't necessarily want to work for a software company, since i expect to have ideas outside of work time that i want to open-source...
 
Typically these are covered by your contract. If you work on something during work hours it definitely belongs to them, they paid you for it. If you write some code and then go home and write basically the exact same code then it still belongs to them: doesn't matter how you reproduced it, you're making a copy. If you work on something, and go home and apply what you learned that day to work on something similar but demonstrably unique it gets murky: your contract will usually have a "no-compete" clause in it saying that you aren't allowed to work on competing projects independently or for another company for a year. In the first two cases it's a legal matter of copyright, in the third it's a contract issue and the worst that'll happen is they sue you for contract violation.
In this case they aren't saying he took what he knew and created something unique, they are accusing him of literally taking the code, rewriting it, and claiming it as his own.
Like, you are hired to draw a picture for a company, the terms of which are that they fully own all rights to that picture. Before you turn it in, you take a photograph. After turning it in, you go home, and using that photograph make an almost identical copy. That's copyright infringement.

i expect to have ideas outside of work time that i want to open-source...
This has been brought up several times in court and successfully defended: as long as the idea is not directly related to the work you're hired to do it's trivial to the point that even a cheap lawyer can get you out of any potential trouble. Worst case, $100 for a well written letter saying "hahaha, no, go away" and you'll be fine.
And it's been my experience that most companies aren't complete assholes about it. The only time it gets problematic is when you try to make something outside of work hours that directly competes with what you do during work hours.
 
I watched a documentary on the history of pornography yesterday in which they claimed, that all new technology is first developed for military purposes (well, that is very much a proven fact) and that the porno industry then adopts the new tech. I don't think that is quite accurate, but still very interesting.

Did VR technology have any roots in military tech development? I thought it was primarily developed for entertainment... the only tech I could relate to VR would be HMDs which had their origin in military applications of course, but VR? I think it was the other way around...

EDIT: For the German speakers: http://www.ardmediathek.de/tv/Quark...hen/Video?bcastId=7450356&documentId=41426662

A bit off topic but interesting, though a bit biased. Not the best episode of quarks & co IMHO
 
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totally, I used to be into vr back in the early 2000's, I was also in the US army. Lots of training simulators used (really shitty) VR contraptions to prepare troops for combat. It was neat at the time, and probably cost tons of money in R&D. I imagine the tech existed probably back to the 90's but I can't vouch for it's existence in the military prior to my time in the service.

While I didn't see first hand, I know the US Air Force has been using VR and Augmented reality for years for flight sims.
 
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