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John Carmack Tech Talk with UMKC-SCE

UMKC School of Science and Engineering
Talks
YouTube
3 HN users recommended this talk3 months2017–2023 score 3.5
Years with an HN recommendation, 2007–2026

Recommended whenever latency, buffering or VR comfort comes up, as an accessible account from someone who dealt with it directly.

John Carmack speaks at UMKC's 2017 commencement event about the difficulties of VR, especially end-to-end latency across hardware and software. He covers why latency and buffering matter and how nausea is addressed.

“a lecture where he describes the difficulties in VR in a manner that anybody with minimal programming experience can understand” (HN, 2017)

1 strong recommendations · 3 recommendations · 1 citations · Talks · intermediate

5 Hacker News comments

From the HN archive; up to 20 kept per video, favoring different commenters. Recommendations first.

@chubot Jul 2017 Strongly recommends
on HN thread Terminal and shell performance
Read more
If you care about end-to-end latency, I highly recommend this talk by John Carmack: [this video] This talk blew my mind and made me feel like a terrible engineer. He's talking about end-to-end latency in VR, which actually has a commercial motivation because VR products with high latency will make you sick. (this obviously doesn't happen with shells and terminals!) He's talking about the buffering and filtering at every step of the way. And it's not just software -- sensors have their own controllers to do filtering, which requires buffering, before your OS kernel can even SEE the the first byte, let alone user space. On the other side, display devices and audio output devices also do nontrivial processing after you've sent them your data. It's an integrated hardware/software problem and Carmack is great at explaining it! It's a dense, long-ish talk, but worth it.
Carmack on end-to-end latency across hardware and software in VR.
@chubot Jul 2017 Recommends
on HN thread Terminal and shell performance
Oh definitely, see my comment here about an excellent talk by John Carmack on this very subject (end-to-end hardware/software latency in VR): [this video] [link]
Carmack on end-to-end hardware/software latency.
@Dig1t May 2023 Recommends
on HN thread Apple's Reality Pro headset compromised
>Also, prolonged use causes nausea in a large percentage of people. There's an excellent video of John Carmack talking about this and how to solve it. This is much less of an issue now. [this video] I agree with you though that there aren't any killer apps for VR/AR yet, and it remains to be seen if there will be any at all.
Carmack on VR nausea and how to solve it.

Citations, criticism and jokes

@hoten Jun 2023 Cites it
on HN thread How does Linux handle writes?
John Carmack's lecture on systems engineering / reducing latency for VR mentions buffers repeatedly: [this video]
Carmack lecture on reducing VR latency mentioning buffers.

Video list and Hacker News comment labels from HackerTube (prompted by @karpathy), released under ODC-By 1.0, built on the open-index/hacker-news archive. Hacker News data is provided by Y Combinator; comments remain the work of their authors. Video titles, channel names and thumbnails belong to their creators and are shown via YouTube. HackerTube Watch is an unofficial edition. Data export of 2026-10-31.

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