OK, so this is another VR talk, but involving Power View and Gadot. And firstly, I'm going
to explain what Power View is. It's a visualizer used in engineering, often for, it's quite
dim. It's often used for doing streamlines in wind tunnels, used to be the software
which came from used to be doing MRI scans, but basically, whenever you have a 3D field
in space and you need to sort of visualize it, you can trace lines through it, you could
do slices through it, you can do marching cubes algorithms through it, and it's been around
since about the 1990s. And the process that we need to do for doing this sort of streamlines
that you do on different models is you do firstly do a big calculation of where all the
air goes, that's usually offline it takes hours, might use a super computer. And then once
you have that data, which is a direction of the air at every cubic millimeter of the
space, you can then run a Power View, which is a much smaller program, which can trace
the lines through it. But it's still too big to run on one of these little headsets, it has
to run on my laptop. So, and that's an example of what wind tunnels used to be, where
you just had a guy in the wind holding a bit of smoke, and that's sort of what the computer
is simulates, although the whole air flow is already simulated, and we just simulate
the smoke through it. And then the workflow which we're going to have is starting with a
model, and I happen to have a friend who builds hand gliders, who does engineering, so
this is kind of handy, is we're going to start with this free CAD model, we then put it into
open phone, which is the big simulation, meshing, massive amount of calculation, then we bring
that into Power View, and then the thing we're doing new is to put CAD out the front end
to do the VR, because CAD out is really good at VR these days, there's another view of the
Power View interface, so this is what most people are using there, pictures here, this is all used,
if you go into a Formula One place, they'll be using this program here, even though it's open
source, they've all got used to it, engineering software generally is pretty ugly looking,
really, but anyway, the next bit is trying to explain what the game's engine is, so a game's
engine, I usually describe it as being just a whole box of different tools, so this is one
off the back of my house, you've just got GPU shaders, user interfaces, you have XR interface,
audio, various different networking things, but they're all different components, and some
of them work well, some don't work so well, but it all goes together, and it's only by
experience that you know which ones you need and putting it together, so then the question is
what's good though, the game's then you've been waiting for, I guess, and it's also free, it's
extremely small, and I've been working on it for about four years, and it's also criticized as
just being a cult, but the point is that you know, I mean everyone you talk to, they're all using
proper, why aren't you using something proper, because the thing is if we're, if we're
open source software developers, we're always working on a crap, that's how it gets good,
because we have to work on it when it's rubbish, like like a cleaning lady, they're always
working on dirty rooms, so you know, even though they make things clean, so the next bit is what's
VR, so I go through my usual talk on what VR is, which is we're trying to go through the
different human computer interfaces we're used to, so we've got one of these, which is being
pretty dominance in 1980, one mouse, two dimensions, and then the next interfaces, we've got this,
we're all pretty much used to doing these, can't live without them now, and then finally we got
the VR, which sort of came in about 2015 roughly, and this is now arguing, this is a completely
different interface from any of the others, it's nothing like them, and the invention, you know,
you can show all the history, but the invention basically was, the moment you got GPUs that could
do, 90 frames a second for two eyes, you got VR, because before then if you did any sort of
frame rate and you moved your head, it would leave the image behind and you get sick, so it was
it was a pretty much a technological thing, and then the really interesting one was then after
after that was about 2019 was the completely mobile ones, which this one is, it's about the
sides of a phone, people still complain about it, but it's pretty good, and it measures the position
of where it is in space by using these little cameras, which watched the ceiling, and they
somehow managed to update from the picture to get the millimeter position of where your head is,
and render the image in under two milliseconds, if it couldn't do that, the images would just be
floating around everywhere on you, and then also on top of that, this is often under
a recognized, are these two devices here, these measure the position in space and rotation,
so that's six degrees of freedom, and you have two of them, so compared to a two-dimension
mouse, we have to be able to make some use of this in terms of engineering and human interface,
and if we don't, we're not trying hard enough, and then of course now all the companies are now
making loads of these ones, I haven't even got half of them here, but the thing about VR is there's no
killer application yet, sort of my definition of a killer application is it's an application,
so useful people who don't like the technology have to use it, right? So it's like people
didn't, you know, accountants didn't want to use computers, but they had to use had to buy
an Apple to have a busy account, so that's kind of where we are, but there isn't an application yet,
also if you go back through the power of use software, which is, you know, been going a long time,
they've got VR, they've started like day one, not 2016, and then you can keep through their
blogs there, every so often they have another guy at it, and then most recently was blog is 2022,
where they're showing, they're putting it on to the HoloLens too, which is now de-funked,
so that's another problem, is that you can easily connect to the wrong piece of hardware,
and also my argument that they're never going to be able to do it very well, because the VR is always
going to be like a little side project to them, whereas it's really a really big specification now,
and it's a specialized thing, so we now have an open-out, XR standard, 300 pages, it's handling hands,
voice, faces, eye tracking, it goes on, and if you're just sort of doing it as a side project,
you'll just do little pieces, and it won't actually make the full use of it.
The Kadoa part of VR has been going since, I don't know, is this guy since about 2021,
he finally got hired, so the Kadoa VR started showing up in about 2018 by this one guy Bastion,
so if you ever do it, he's the king of it, and he was so good that they managed to get some
money to hire him in as a core team, and so he's one of the six people, and he's well into it,
but that's sort of what how VR works is, there's guys like me who just really like using the
technology and we're desperate to find some use for it, versus most people who find it pretty useless,
and yeah, it's been going on quite nice, quite pretty graphics these too, so we're going to do
quick simulation run through of what the whole project is, is you start out with the glider,
it's mesh, there's all in free cans, that's where it's been designed, and you define a,
what do we call, a domain, the fluid domain, so this is the box which is going to contain the
air that we're going to simulate, it goes, it's usually about three meters in front and goes off
for five meters behind to really pick up all the turbulence that's going to trail off the wing,
then you define all the boundary conditions of it, so there's an inlet front and then the outlet,
so the air is going solid, solid constant rates in the outlet, and then the other sides,
everything's running parallel, and then we have this sort of reflection plane because the calculation
is going to take three hours, so if we can just avoid making the mirror image of it, we can cut that
from six hours down to three hours and also not blast all the ram on our computer, so that's another
kind of trick they use. During the simulation, this is what's known as a solid steady state simulation,
so just keep iterating, time after time is simulating air flow until all becomes stationary,
or stable, and all the same, each cube has the same amount of air going in as coming out,
and the sort of graph showing after each calculation iteration, whether that's going down,
usually, often sometimes you get these ones that are unstable, and the simulation blows up,
so you have to just train things a little bit, and then they might converge, but that's usually
the problem they're hitting. Now, when you're done with the simulation, you get this,
what's it? It's sort of a hierarchical cell, so the volumes are all divided up, and they get
really tiny right close to the edges, where the actual fluid's going to be flowing in different
ways, and they get quite large further away. If you had at the same scale all the way through,
you would never have enough memory for running it, but so there's sort of different layers of
depth in all and 3D is what's essential for it to work, so here's where we'll show a little bit of
video of what went on inside, so this is filmed from the PC, so normally if you watch a VR film,
you'll see that they're all waving around, so at least this is stationary, so that's the other
guy who's networked to my laptop, and if you look down here, you can start to see the sort of
the vortex of the wind as it's coming off the air, it flows down in the middle, and then flows
up on the side, and that sort of gives the glider some lift, and once I've got it transmitted
into this go-games engine, I'm able to do all kinds of operations on it like a flatnet,
well, it's subtracted off the velocity, so you can see the graph, see the drag,
the this is what I'm also quite pleased of, these are the two designers here, neither of them
care about VR particularly really, so the fact that they were here for 20 minutes, having
look around it was like a sign of having a bit of a killer app, I think, so that was kind of nice,
so they probably I think believe they're facing each other, but they're kind of like
displored this place because I'm not really designed this to work in the same room, and then he
almost goes and treads on something, so anyway, so what did we just see, so let's just have a little
look at those, I'm free to do a demo over in the over over room over in J later on, if anyone's
wants to have a go, that's what they were building in the real life, one of these things,
so what we saw was, could though mobile, so it's running in this, so all this needs to do is
it can do all the graphics really well, it can't do the simulation, so what we do is we just
pick a point, send it off to the PC, and return back a streamlined, and that's all we really need to
do, and then the other bit was the animating GPU shaders that was quite surprisingly useful,
just a little tweaks that add the the swing actually has a lot of engineering relevance that I
hadn't been aware of, the the Gado system has GPU shaders that are humane, one could say,
they're easy, easy for normal people to edit them because they've been simplified down or
dumb down or something, and then you can put in little experiments, and then finally, I've put
in a networking onto this, onto this game, so the networking is something I've claimed is really,
really important in any engineering VR, because what happens is you normally want to show it to
someone who's an engineer who doesn't know how to drive VR, and if you normally put headset on them,
you spend the entire time teaching the controls and stuff, and really what you want to do is
show them around, which is why you need a second player in the game, and that's been quite a
fight quite a while, because normally these these multiplayer things only happen in very large
systems like the one you just saw over at an VR chat or the very few ones that do it, and I've
managed to gradually build it into Gado, and that's about it, so you have another Gado talk later on
about three hours or two hours, and also the VR over in J-Building is also available, if you
haven't had enough VR, yes, so that's it.