Author Topic: CastAR launched on kickstarter  (Read 36077 times)

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Offline janoc

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Re: CastAR launched on kickstarter
« Reply #75 on: June 28, 2017, 06:54:51 pm »
The problem is that it would have been a nightmare to support a PC based system with all the different kit out there, especially to get reliable low latency.

Low latency for what? Rendering? Their system was not particularly latency sensitive, unlike something like Oculus Rift where if you have 20ms "motion to photon" latency people start to see their dinners second time.

Moreover, since then there are specific low latency extensions by Nvidia that both Rift & Vive use (not sure whether AMD has released something similar but it is likely).

Jeri strongly felt it was important to get a good, fast out-of-the-box experience, and that was only ever going to be possible with  a standalone system. They weren't going for bleeding-edge graphics performance as the resolution is limited by the projectors. I think they were basing was a fairly bog-standard Android phone/tablet chip with a small FPGA to manage splitting the video to the projectors and deal with the camera data, and a very cut-down and customised version of Android.

I can understand the technical desire for a total control of the platform, however introducing yet another incompatible system for game development to the market is an insane decision from a commercial point of view. They are/were hardly Nintendo or Sony to be able to afford that.

That something runs Android doesn't mean you could benefit from the ecosystem and existing content. Ouya was a stellar example and that machine could actually run normal Android games - and failed regardless. Other such examples are Samsung's GearVR and Google's Daydream (Google VR). They are both super niche platforms and would be all dead like Ouya already if there wasn't for a big company behind them using them as loss leaders to sell more of their smartphones.

My guess is deciding to effectively buy their own game studio to make custom games was a big drain on money - I wonder if a lower-key, much lower volume  initial launch with a few games and all the tools to let people get developing might have been a lower risk approach. Or maybe they hit some hard technical issues.

That's precisely the consequence of what I have said above. If you decide to build your own platform, supporting it is going to be all on your back and going out of your own pocket until the system gains the critical mass and starts to  have content made for it by external developers. If it ever does - there are way more failed game consoles around than the successful ones and few, even large, development studios can afford to support obscure hardware. Game development is very expensive - even much larger and much better established Oculus backed by the Facebook money has shuttered their own content development studio recently.

« Last Edit: June 28, 2017, 06:59:46 pm by janoc »
 


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