HN user
Darshan Shankar
Now:
Bigscreen, a new Virtual Reality startup building collaboration software. Backed by Andreessen Horowitz. Read more: https://blog.bigscreenvr.com/bigscreen-raises-11-million-in-series-a-financing-led-by-true-ventures-a2d49da40e
Founder & CEO of Flotype
Y Combinator alum (Winter 2011)
UC Berkeley EECS (dropped out 2010)
Twitter: @dshankar
Email: dnshankar at gmail
Bigscreen Beyond developer here. This game is incredible and moody to play in VR on the OLED-based Beyond headset. Congrats to the team on shipping a fantastic game. I love what you've done with it
Norm Chan from Tested.com reviews the Bigscreen Beyond and the Pimax Crystal, with brief comparisons to headsets like the Quest Pro and Apple Vision Pro.
disclosure: I'm Darshan, YC alum (W2011) and founder/CEO of Bigscreen.
Speaking of Bigscreen...it was released for mobile today :-D
Oculus Go launch title and also Samsung GearVR support
Bigscreen does this and is a launch title for the Oculus Go. It's available today.
https://blog.bigscreenvr.com/bigscreen-is-launching-today-on...
Stream your Windows PC --> mobile VR headset using the "Bigscreen Remote Desktop" feature
"almost no current laptops have the GPU performance for the recommended spec, though upcoming mobile GPUs may be able to support this level of performance."
This WAS true in 2015 but is NOT TRUE today. All the Nvidia Pascal-generation desktop GPUs (2016) run extremely well on laptops. Since 2016, there is no more "mobile class" Nvidia GPU designation.
The "VR Ready" laptops are popular, and they have a 1050, 1060, 1070, and even an Nvidia 1080 GPU. These are very powerful gaming laptops, and some are still in slim form factors like the Razor Blade, and relatively affordable for a laptop ($1400-2000)
Salary & equity depends on experience, location, and the role.
We expect to be hiring much more senior management roles in the next 6-12 months as well, an engineering manager and a product manager.
Therefore, it's a very wide range from $50k to $150k in salary, and 0.1% to 2% in equity.
Fullstack: https://jobs.lever.co/bigscreenvr/284548b4-7876-4bb2-97fc-36...
Front-end: https://jobs.lever.co/bigscreenvr/2a268771-b32e-42b0-bc6d-98...
Back-end: https://jobs.lever.co/bigscreenvr/ade2408f-20ee-42d7-bfd8-3f...
Remote | Full Time
Bigscreen is a VR/AR company building an immersive, social computing platform. Think "VR Operating System"
We have over 250,000 users on the Rift & Vive. Our power users spend 20-30 hours each week using the product, and tens of thousands of people use Bigscreen every single weekend, making Bigscreen a "killer app" of VR.
We're a tiny team (3 developers) building one of the most successful VR startups with product-market fit and $3 million in funding from top VCs like Andreessen Horowitz. Previously, I was the founder of a Y Combinator startup (YC W11), and before that I studied EECS at UC Berkeley.
We're hiring experienced senior engineers, designers, and artists that enjoy working remotely. Most roles do not require any prior VR experience.
Our VR app is built in C++ and C# (Unity3D), our backend infra is WebRTC & Node.js, and our VR UI front-end is actually HTML/CSS/Javascript.
- Frontend developer (HTML/CSS/Javascript)
- Fullstack developer (Javascript)
- Backend developer (Node.js, Firebase)
- Interaction / UI designer
- Unity3D developer
darshan@bigscreenvr.com
Bigscreen lets you view any content in VR that you can currently view on your computer, not just web content.
You can see your entire desktop on floating virtual screens, which enables you to use your any desktop app (including but not limited to your web browser).
You are absolutely correct. I think there's a massive opportunity for "3D programs" (Blender, Maya, AutoCAD, etc.) to become native VR applications.
Bigscreen is instead about the other 99% content that's completely 2D. I wrote a blog post[1] about our founding mission and one example in there is Microsoft Word. Even in VR/AR, the words won't be flying around you in 3D space. Movies and videogames won't disappear and be replaced by 360 and VR games anytime soon.
The question that Bigscreen is tackling is instead: how can VR/AR improve our 2D computing experience?
[1] https://blog.bigscreenvr.com/3-million-financing-round-led-b...
I'd love to learn more about how you're using Bigscreen (and how we can make it better for you). Could you email me? darshan@bigscreenvr.com
Bigscreen founder here. Thanks for the kind words! If you have any bugs or feature requests, please let me know! darshan@bigscreenvr.com
The original "Show HN" turned out OK https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=8863
(that was nearly 10 years ago!)
There is no such thing as a `foveated display`
There is foveated rendering: a rendering optimization technique where you render at higher resolutions where the eye is looking at due to higher visual acuity in a small ~5-degree circle thanks to a large concentration of cones in the fovea of the eye.
This has nothing to do with the actual pixel density of HMDs. Physical pixel density remains an issue, and foveated rendering does not solve that.
edit: Perhaps I misunderstood, are you talking about retinal laser projected displays and concentrating the beam on the fovea?
HUDs (i.e. face-locked user interface elements, as opposed to world-space UI like on the cockpit surfaces) can cause discomfort in VR. One reason is the vergence accommodation conflict. Focusing on objects inches away from your face is also difficult and painful with the current generation of VR headsets due to the fixed focal plane (1.5m in DK2, infinity in others).
I've played EVE:Valkyrie for a few hours in the Rift, and the cockpit-based UI is extremely comfortable.
No desktop VR headset is wireless today, and won't be for the foreseeable future due to latency and bandwidth requirements.
Wires are suboptimal but tracked wires (just like the headset is tracked. i.e. you'll see the wire in VR) should alleviate this problem until wireless technologies mature.
Mobile VR will provide room-scale tracking without wires in 2016. Watch this space.
FYI, it doesn't require a $2,500 gaming machine. The recommended specifications require a PC that costs roughly $1,000. "Oculus Ready" certified PCs start at $950.
Not sure where you'd get the idea that Oculus isn't working on non-sexy problems, considering how many people Oculus has working on controls (Oculus Touch), motion sickness, and yes eye tracking too. Obviously Oculus is working on "head tracking" - that's been around since 2012.
Either way, you are correct: waiting to hear about the Vive is a good idea. VR in general (Vive, Rift, etc.) is very much an early adopter technology for the next couple years.
Minor note: AR is far from maturity. The FoV and resolution pales in comparison to VR. 30-degrees (like looking through a pinhole) versus 110-degrees is a massive difference that's hard to explain. AR and VR are like sister technologies that will one day converge.
AR approaching VR by improving FoV and resolution over the next decade, and VR approaching AR by improving real-world capture & scene reconstruction.
Major trade shows in the coming months are your best bet. I assume you're in SF and the next best SF event to demo would be GDC in March (if you can wait that long)
"3rd to market"?
The first consumer VR hardware on the market was the GearVR, made by Samsung AND Oculus.
The second consumer VR hardware on the market is likely to be the Oculus Rift (Q1 Jan-Mar shipping) and the Vive is likely to be the third to market (est. April shipping)
This is nothing like the developer previews from years ago. You should read up on the major differences from the DK1->DK2->CV1. Each was a massive leap forward in capability.
Note: I've been developing VR for 1+ years and own every VR headset.
Both the Vive and the Rift have head tracking. Positional head tracking has been around since 2014.
The Vive has "room-scale" tracking that lets you walk around a large room-sized space, and includes hand controllers that are also tracked in the world.
The Rift should support "room-scale" with more cameras, but is not a main focus/supported use case yet for Oculus. The Oculus Touch is like the Vive's tracked hand controllers.
They are far more similar to each other than most people realize.
It is unlikely to be obsolete in 1 year. The update/release cycle for VR headsets (at least for Oculus) is expected to be somewhere between consoles (6-8 years) and smartphones (1 year).
Pricing will be announced on Jan 6 morning and should help you decide.
Note: I work full-time developing VR software and own every VR headset.
Those are really the only three outcomes for a venture-backed startup
Once you raise venture capital, you have to go big or go home, in the span of a decade. You don't have the "grow slow and stay private" option after raising a Series A.
That being said, this is just the current, common state in VC-backed companies. With the weak IPO market and hostile public environment that forces short-term quarterly thinking, we may see alternatives like formalized secondary markets. Perhaps companies like Uber will be able to avoid going public and still provide liquidity options for their early investors & employees.
This was a fascinating read. Surprised that painters have seemingly good working conditions, set their own hours, and work from home!
Just a random idea: when targeting mid-market customers, have you considered going "Watsi" style? Instead of an Instapainting storefront, what about commissioning artwork directly from painters? Display the painter's name, their photo, number of previous paintings painted, and their affordable price to commission a painting.
Effectively, you could become the Internet-version of those studios themselves.
Instead, I wonder if YC can formalize & self-regulate a secondary market as an intermediate step before IPOs. This is already happening, but with undesirable side effects.
Explanation for why this is occurring:
Slack's desktop apps are HTML5 webapps wrapped inside native desktop wrappers. Specifically, Slack uses Github's Electron (formerly, Atom Shell) which is basically Chromium. The desktop app is a webpage inside Chromium.
Commenters have seemed to miss that this phone isn't designed for the "90%" that don't have WiFi. This isn't designed for African villages where electricity is spotty and LTE is non-existent.
This is designed for tech-savvy parts of the world that care about having cloud-connected phones with "infinite" storage. Anyone that takes thousands of photos on their 15MP phone cameras & 1080p/4K video knows the pain of phones with limited storage.
It makes no sense to say a product sucks because it sucks for groups of people that it wasn't designed for in the first place.
If you're having difficulty loading this webpage, it's because the author decrypted Facebook's iOS binary and listed all 18,000 header files.
Yes, this webpage is merely a list of 18,000 headers.
On a freighter? I'd love to know more.
Or one of those Caribbean leisure cruises? Those are cheap upfront - to get you in the door - relying on in-ship purchases (like alcohol & restaurants) to make the majority of their money.
I've been wanting to do this for years, but it's hardly "extremely affordable" – on average, it's anywhere from $3,000 to $10,000 per person for a 2-4 week trip.
PG is recommending you get the X.com, but that doesn't mean you need to pay $50,000 for X.com on Day 1 of your startup. I see people making this mistake all the time, buying expensive domains before validating their startup in the first place.
Think about what Dropbox, Stripe, and AirBnB did!
getdropbox.com -> dropbox.com
devpayments.com -> stripe.com
airbedandbreakfast.com -> airbnb.comThat's because you treat VR vs AR vs reality as three different extremes.
They're not.
Think of them as a spectrum. VR + stereoscopic image passthrough gets you an AR-like view of the real world around you. These overlays allow you to pick up coffee cups, see when your kid is poking you, etc.
I'm working on this!