VR Ate My Homework

In there is a new world! In there is our future! In there is our destiny! – Kevin Lynn, Tron Legacy

I know this steak doesn’t exist. I know that when I put it in my mouth, the Matrix is telling my brain that it is juicy and delicious. After nine years, you know what I realize? Ignorance is bliss. – Cypher, The Matrix

I’ve wrapped up my last few days at my current engineering gig and looking forward to starting my new gig next week. Winter quarter at UW is wrapping up too, and the post title is a bit hyperbolic, but not much. Translating opaque equations and buggy MATLAB code from various academic papers into Python and NumPy is no cake walk and I have two weeks left to get it done.

But I’ve gone further down the VR rabbit hole too. I got my first gaming rig to drive the Oculus and its an order of magnitude more addictive this way. It’s a HP Omen 30L with an AMD Ryzen 7 5800X 8-Core 3.8 GHz CPU, 16 GB of memory, an NVIDIA GeForce RTX 3060 Ti GPU and a 1TB SSD. When the Oculus is connected to it via USB 3.x the system has no trouble keeping up with the intense visuals of Club Citadel in the Oasis, a delicious virtual goth club in VRChat.

And it is delicious.

Like steak.

Oontz oontz oontz.

This Weeks Link Storm

A selection of things that have caught my attention or have been shared with me.

Engineering

• MATLAB is a terrible programming language Yes it is. It really is. I’m appreciating Python more these days than before, especially as my academic license to MATLAB is about to go poof.
• A Career Ending Mistake When it comes to your career… it’s about the planning, not the plan
• OQ is trying to combine cellular and satellite for the IoT Another interesting lead from Stacey on IoT. If I understand the platform correctly, they are actually supporting cellular from low earth orbit, Doppler and all. I wonder how well it actually works.

Homework Eaters

• Kinect to VR Full body tracking might be possible with an old Xbox One Kinect that has been sitting unused in a drawer here
• Grunge Texture Looping Background I’ve been following Twitch VR and DJ streamers more lately. Curious about how to build a “starting soon” video loop myself.
• The VR Goth Scene is Here Come join the dark side. We have cookies.
• Anime Avatars Are Going Mainstream on Twitch True, very true. Next comes the furries.

See you next week with more!