Supermodel Forum

Hello everyone,

Friday was my final day at Apple. I resigned in order to go independent for an indeterminate amount of time and pursue new ideas, probably in the AR/VR space, with the hopes of striking upon something worth going all-in on and meeting prospective collaborators. This was a hard decision and the uncertainty ahead is daunting. But I've wanted to do this for a long time and I will do my best to make the most of the opportunity.



Things are off to a nice start. My entry to the OpenCV Spatial AI competition won first place for the North America region out of 257 finalists. I didn't get a global prize but I was in the top 5 for that, too. Check out the video! I can still win the Popular Prize for my region so please vote for American STEREOtypes here and spread the word

As for Supermodel, while this does mean that I can contribute again, I don't think I'll be able to do much given the pressure to produce new work. I would like to transition the repo to Github, which should make it easier for people to contribute. I also would like to slowly chip away at modernizing the code base and maybe exploring porting over Dolphin's JIT compiler. Lastly, I want to tackle emulation of the actual Pro-1000, beginning where Ian left off. I'm not sure when I'll look into any of this. Let's see how the first few weeks of unemployment go.

Thank you,

Bart

Well, best of luck in your new endeavor!

Good luck Bart, glad you managed to come first out of all the other NA competitors in the competition and hope your decision to strike out independently pays off.

I'm happy for you for following your dreams! The best thing you can do is to do what you love.

Good luck Bart:) you have an exceptional skill set I'm sure you'll do well with whatever you set your mind to. It's crazy how our work overlaps. I've been working in vr for a while mostly for industry. You said something about expensive tracking systems in your video. The valve lighthouse tracking is exceptionally cheap and you don't need a headset to make it work. We use it sometimes for cave vr where previously they would use a 10k or more tracking system.

Realistically I could earn double or maybe triple what I make now. But life is a balance, no point in spending the majority of your life working on something you have no passion for. The big money around here is in defense companies. Writing software to drop bombs on people doesn't really interest me. The company I work for is very small. I went through periods of time where I didn't get paid for 6 months in developing our current project. It's like chicken and egg, in order to make money you need a product, but products cost time and money to make. Those times were very hard. But we are now eating up our competition which is a much larger company that literally had maybe an 8 year headstart on us and roughly 10x the developers. We got lucky but it could have easily gone the other way where we did all that work and weren't successful. In the end of the day you have to make enough to live. The business world is hard, the competition never sleeps.

Not sure I have advice, only past experiences.

I hope everything goes well for you, and I already voted for you...

Wow this is the first time I've seen Bart make an on camera video. Cool!

Good luck Bart. Your contribution to the community cannot be overstated bro. You will always be an absolute legend in my book. Without you giving us this wonderful Supermodel emulator, I would have never gotten a chance to enjoy Scud Race or Daytona 2. So thanks for this gift and keep us posted on whatever happens moving forward, Supermodel related or not.

Ian wrote:Good luck Bart:) you have an exceptional skill set I'm sure you'll do well with whatever you set your mind to. It's crazy how our work overlaps. I've been working in vr for a while mostly for industry. You said something about expensive tracking systems in your video. The valve lighthouse tracking is exceptionally cheap and you don't need a headset to make it work. We use it sometimes for cave vr where previously they would use a 10k or more tracking system.

I was speaking with someone today over the phone who has been using Lighthouse tracking and contributing to some open source project to allow them to scale better. They could definitely work, although I think there is an advantage to off-the-shelf cameras being easier to set up. Coupled with HMD inside-out tracking, and object detection, and I think we are getting close to be able to do things like laser tag or The Void very cheaply.

Realistically I could earn double or maybe triple what I make now. But life is a balance, no point in spending the majority of your life working on something you have no passion for.

This is very true. Time is the most valuable thing we have anyway. What good is 2x-3x more money when you're losing precious time.

The big money around here is in defense companies. Writing software to drop bombs on people doesn't really interest me. The company I work for is very small. I went through periods of time where I didn't get paid for 6 months in developing our current project. It's like chicken and egg, in order to make money you need a product, but products cost time and money to make. Those times were very hard. But we are now eating up our competition which is a much larger company that literally had maybe an 8 year headstart on us and roughly 10x the developers. We got lucky but it could have easily gone the other way where we did all that work and weren't successful. In the end of the day you have to make enough to live. The business world is hard, the competition never sleeps.

That's awesome to hear I'm glad you guys are kicking butt over there! With a small team like that, you get to really see the fruits of labor and have a meaningful impact. XR is a great space to be in now and I think it will only get more exciting in the next 12-24 months. Are you guys still primarily doing CAVE setups or looking into ordinary VR, too?

Not sure I have advice, only past experiences.

Well, it's hard to give someone advice when they themselves aren't quite sure what they are aiming for I'm going to go with the flow and just work on silly small projects. I will probably first try to port my HoloLens helicopter game (which was actually quite fun) to Snapchat, given that their platform has a lot of eyeballs on it and has become impressively capable. I also want to get better at playing piano and might do some sort of experience with that and Oculus Quest 2 passthrough mode. And I'm talking to a game studio of ex-Magic Leap folks in California about maybe doing some part-time work for them porting a full-length game from WebXR to Snapchat's Lens platform. I think my experience with AR will help and they also have some budget for gameplay prototyping on the Next Gen Spectacles AR glasses, which is right up my alley, too.

Abelardator2 wrote:I hope everything goes well for you, and I already voted for you...

Thanks a lot, man!

I wish you the best of lucks! And whenever you go, remember, viva La Revlolucion!