kanetw

The short, stupid answer is: transistor count and size.

Explaining it in detail requires more background in electronics, but that's ultimately what it boils down to.

High-end analog front ends can reach the three-digit GHz (non-silicon processes admittedly, but still).

The Kria SOM in use here is like $300.

KF funnily enough is one of the few remaining websites for reasonable discussions about politically charged topics.

The defendant not showing up is peak stupid. Especially if you think it's a non-issue, fucking show up.

Anyway, it will have no impact on KF, just like every other deplatforming attempt just made it more popular.

The key factor is how fast units need to ship. In general, the scaling is sub-linear due to

1. reduced per-component costs (volume discounts)

2. less administrative/engineering overhead (ie the salaries/one-off costs get divided among more units)

3. more optimized assembly processes

Assembly labor expenses are directly proportional to how many units need to ship per timeframe. If an assembly worker can assemble 10 units a day, you're shipping 200 units/month. So you can ship 1000 units in 5 months or hire 5 people and ship 1000 units in 1 month.

No, we fully agree it's a hard problem. Which is why we wrote functional software first, and then went into hardware when the existing hardware couldn't support our use cases.

There's problems with the software that need to be solved before we ship, but it's not with the UI side of things. That's not to say that the UI is perfect (it really isn't), but it's functional and more importantly: can be changed at any time, unlike hardware.

With our current design, we break even at about exactly 1k units.

We're still accepting SAFEs. Contact georges@simulavr.com for details.

Yeah, understandable. For us it's a deliberate design decision to minimize the amount of moving parts (=hassle, things to get tangled in, etc.)

We've tightened up the numbers a bit, but it's pretty close to a honest amount. 4m would put us well into profitable S1 production + enough runway to develop the next iteration territory.

> I've also seen a16z invest in far less (pitch decks and hand-wave demos). So my read on the feedback is they've made too much progress on one front (enough to show a16z that they're not a compelling seed investment) but not enough progress on the other front (enough to warrant a PMF A round). Doesn't seem like a fun spot to be in.

That's how I feel as well, given feedback from other VCs we've applied at. Amplify told us roughly "too big for a seed, too small for a series A" after five meetings or so.

Our solution to this is to make the compute modular. In a few years you can plug in a new (off-the-shelf) compute module and have a state of the art PC again.

The Hololens 2's PPD are largely fake. There was a writeup somewhere but it's way, way below the stated number.

Varjo is pretty high up there, and they're able to compete in the clarity department. But their headset is non-portable and only supports Nvidia+Windows (at least last time I checked).

Yeah. Your average U-CPU (what you'd get in a 13" or 15" ultrabook, and what we use) has a TDP of 9-28W. That's well within the range of what a modern phone can boost to.

The ideal optical design is such that your optical spot size/MTF is matched to your pixel size in a way that

* subpixels are blurred, and it's hard to see the boundary between pixels * you still have enough resolution to resolve text clearly

Our headset has that, and I'm confident Apple's will too.

It's probably safer than looking at a phone, but the most important reason is that your field of view/camera offset vs eyes is different than you're used to and it's easy to get into a dangerous situation.

You probably shouldn't walk outside with our headset on, but indoors, absolutely. Turn on passthrough and off you go.

Publicly accessible DNS resolvers are an awful idea. Don't do it.

I blackholed .zip and .mov in my DNS servers.

(SimulaVR dev) It's not wrong to say that in most cases, tasks are better solved without an FPGA. But when you need one you need one (or an ASIC if you have the volume and don't need reconfigurability)

We will. In this particular case it was easier to ship with Arch, but we still prefer NixOS.

For the auto booting variant, I used a normal display and installed everything (well, ssh and then ssh'd in and did the rest).

The Simula WM needs a regular display, so I faked one with evdi. Rest is just a .xinitrc that launches Monado and Simula, and X autolaunch.

SLVS-EC has some very minor issues when interfacing (DC offset compliance) which requires a hack in detecting when the link is up. And yeah, MIPI D-PHY is a royal pain unless you have native support (Xilinx, Lattice, Intel Agilex 5). C-PHY even more so.

C-PHY is so incredibly fucked up.

I can't say much because NDA, but it's not the most difficult protocol to reverse engineer.

Also, if we decide to make our own RX IP for it, there's a good chance I can open source it. Will have to have a lawyer look over the licensing/NDA terms to make sure we're not messing anything up in that case.

I'm aware of event-based cameras and looked at them for Simula's SLAM, but last time I checked my distro they were fairly pricy (for a device like this anyway). I'll ask my contact how much they cost.

The image pipeline here is for AR passthrough, which has different requirements than SLAM (although nothing's stopping you from using the images for SLAM as well).

Well in excess of human eye resolution, around 100 PPD at 2ft distance with a 28 degree FOV.

Peak human eye res is 60 PPD.

Sure. You can either run a 2D WM inside Simula or use it with something like Virtual Desktop

It's kind of incredible how we can basically document our entire development process and people still go "it's a Kickstarter scam"

I don't have an XR2 devkit so I can only guess, but TDP-wise they seem pretty comparable. Obviously that doesn't include boost power etc and there's stuff integrated into the XR2 that we need to do on an FPGA, but overall I've not felt like a modern x86 processor is overly disadvantaged.

I'm sure one could do a more rigorous comparison, but IMO with the recent Intel/AMD chips you get pretty good performance/power.

No, absolutely not Q4. We need to update that, but Q1-Q2 23 depending on how things go with suppliers.

The compute pack is detachable, so you can decouple it and put it somewhere else.

I think it's a less elegant solution overall, but it's an option (eg for supine computing or to lessen the head weight).

You can install any distro. Windows is doable in theory, we just don't focus on it.