Today at our lab we were comparing the performance of the Samsung S8 phone to the Galaxy Note 4. As it happens, my first SmartPhone was a Galaxy Note 4.<\/p>\n
I only got it because it worked with the newly emerging GearVR, and in the second half of 2014 I wanted our lab to do untethered shared virtual reality. Back then, sticking OptiTrack motion capture marker on GearVRs was the easiest way.<\/p>\n
Now, three years later, we are still using the GearVR for this, except now the OptiTracks have been replaced by Vive trackers (only available in the last few months), which are a lot less expensive than OptiTracks. Of course we’ve upgraded to the latest model SmartPhone — the S8.<\/p>\n
The S8 is vastly faster than the Note 4 was. Which means everything works a lot better — graphics rendering, character movement, position tracking — all of the qualities that make for a good and immersive shared VR experience.<\/p>\n
Today I was trying to convey to my students just how quickly all of this technology is advancing, thanks to good old Moore’s Law. “You know how a year is around seven dog years?” I said.<\/p>\n
The students nodded. They all knew about that.<\/p>\n
“Well,” I explained, “a dog year is basically around seven computer years. Which means that a year is around forty nine computer years.”<\/p>\n
“In other words,” I continued, trying to put it into terms that would resonate with computer science students, “a dog year is the square root of a computer year.” <\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
Today at our lab we were comparing the performance of the Samsung S8 phone to the Galaxy Note 4. As it happens, my first SmartPhone was a Galaxy Note 4. I only got it because it worked with the newly emerging GearVR, and in the second half of 2014 I wanted our lab to do … Continue reading “A dog year is the square root of a computer year”<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":[],"categories":[1],"tags":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"http:\/\/blog.kenperlin.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/19205"}],"collection":[{"href":"http:\/\/blog.kenperlin.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"http:\/\/blog.kenperlin.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/blog.kenperlin.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/blog.kenperlin.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=19205"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"http:\/\/blog.kenperlin.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/19205\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":19206,"href":"http:\/\/blog.kenperlin.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/19205\/revisions\/19206"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"http:\/\/blog.kenperlin.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=19205"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/blog.kenperlin.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=19205"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/blog.kenperlin.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=19205"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}