What are the pros and cons of open sourcing with an independent VR company like Pimax?

Fennec is right, this one is a big pro. Universities is where a lot of new ground gets broken, so this could be great.

Cons are off course, things like stolen IP, copycats, and if you don’t have the proper infrastructure behind your attempt at open source, bugs, security issues, etc.

As far as finding the coding talent goes, and getting volunteers, that will be largely up to Pimax, and off course lots of community outreach. There are not a few

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Agreed it might be an idea of sorts as you’ve said to build it similar to Amdgpu where opensource connects to propietary core.

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It’s really impossible to know without seeing the extent and execution of the open sourcing.

Eg:
Potential Pro situation:
-A well-constructed repository with good build tools is released
-This allows anyone to easily work on issues and make PRs
-Anyone is able to painlessly check out build the project and run it using industry standard toolchains
-An attentive admin team properly vets and merges pulls
-The result is that quality of life features rapidly proliferate, and bug fixes occur quickly

Potential Con situation:
-We get an impenenatrable mess of a project with lots of unknown dependencies
-Janky makefiles and project organization requires esoteric build tools/IDEs
-Everyone who wants to work on it immediately starts their own fork to port it to their own pet dev environment, splintering development and resulting in limited pulls being made to original project
-Staff are inattentative/sloppy with merging pulls, lowering user trust in nightly builds

The pro situation would result in great pace of development with many contributors. The con situation would result in something like Simucube, where really nobody except the original developers contribute anyway.

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This thread is quite funny.

Pimax: “We are going open source” !!!
Us: “yeaaaaah”
Pimax: “Wait. What are the pro’s and cons of open source”?

LOL

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Pro:

  1. Skyrim is an excellent example here. The game is so old now, yet it can have the absolute most cutting edge visuals and gameplay because of the accessibility of tools to modify it. Community involvement at a technical level can be an extremely strong force rooting deeply in vr in pimax’s case.
  2. Big budget firms may build upon the software to their needs (vr arcades/enterprise etc)
  3. Unlocking the devices utmost potential via crowdsourcing
  4. Modding creates strong communities.
  5. The things a large crowd sourced community of programmers might “fix” or “enhance” are valuable for pimax and pimax future.
  6. I’m (or probably many people) are less likely to make negative noise online when there is a workaround.
  7. Innovation can come from anywhere

Cons:

  1. Lack of hobbyist developers or developers who fix pet peeves. Possibly offering a “bounty” for fixes on your open source might help this.

  2. Lack of interest because it’s not fully open or open enough to be accessible and viable to make changes.

  3. Potential for a wide open black door without some methodology for verifying safe changes. (Aka security concerns without some intermediate verification strictly to monitor malicious programming). It may not be common or likely, but nonetheless a concern.

  4. Not having access to the components code (screen-timings as an example) might remove a lot of the allure, of this is the case.

  5. Personal liability must be acknowledged for engaging changes.
    Edit:

  6. Like others have said, the source would have to be well documented and coherent for random people to play around with it.

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Good point about compatibility between two or more separate projects. That would stink of they didn’t play nice together.

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I’m predicting this. I’ve said it before, Pimax will not open the interesting parts, so it will end up in some API that has no real value. I’m really skeptical about this ‘open source’ initiative.

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Perhaps unless you look at this way.

If they had their internal meetings on this path. Asking the community for input they can see if their discussions & research aligns up. And also gives them possible info/angle missed in their research/meetings.

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That was sort of the situation with skyrim. But due to Skyrim’s overwhelming popularity people brute forced things like script extenders etc via reverse programming hex code I think. Anyways, yeah, it def needs to be really open to do anything interesting I’d guess.

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LOL @Sjef the way you wrote that out makes it sound like an SNL sketch lol I highly doubt that’s how it went down.

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In March it was a matter of weeks before Pimax begins shipping the lighthouses to the backers, given Kevin…

But it was clear (at least for me) he already had the idea in mind he will manage to convince people to wait for the controllers, because he wanted to save costs.

No luck, the community didn’t agree with his plan so he just decided to come back on his own promise to let the backers have the final word, he censored all the discussions and polls showing the backers didn’t want to wait the controllers to have their LHs shipped, and he came with that new excuse of a very high minimum order from valve to force the lighthouse delay, exactly as he initially wanted to do.

So now don’t expect me to take for true a single word coming out of his mouth. If the reality behind this was he just spoke too fast in March then the minimum was to apologize for this after giving false hopes. I haven’t seen a single word from him about this, so I can only assume he is either too pretentious for that “or” his only option really was to force the delay, whatever the opinion of the backers.

Do you really think such serious discussion can happen between Pimax and the community when they already cannot understand the difference when we speak about the black dot pattern VS dead pixels ?? (with pictures showing the black dots !..)

They will just do what they think is better after discussing between them, exactly has they have decided alone about how to introduce the 5K+. We were just informed informed about their decision at the very last minute, as the 5K+ was made public at the very last minute, right before showcasing it for the first time at the Berlin meetup.

There has never been any constructive discussion between Pimax and the community on this forum, I’d bet 95% of the suggestions/discussions that happen on this forum remains unknown by Pimax. They only come there from time to time to make annoucements for which we often need to join our force for weeks to decrypt the real meaning of what they said. And you think there is going to be a serious discussion about pro and cons of open sourcing ? Let me… have a doubt :sweat_smile:

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I see many improvements made following suggestion made here… many of those not available on other headset

o 5k
o Contrast ajustements
o Refresh ajustements
o Open source

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Well, that was the 5% not buried into the abyss of this forum :smile:

That’s a lot of efforts to get “only” contrast and refresh adjustments… (cannot say for the 5K, I wasn’t there yet, just heard about it being a community suggestion).

edit: don’t get me wrong, I don’t mean implementing contrast and refresh didn’t require efforts, and I thanks Pimax for doing it as both are useful. But still, only “this” after 2 years of developments…

I think the same as sjefdeklerk, in the end only unimportant parts may be open sourced, and the real goal of making people discuss about this is to make them wait while Pimax tries to fulfill the KS promises (last part, my personal opinion).

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I do as the Black dots were explained as to why they were there and was first reported by Sweviver. Robin himself gave the explanation. What pimax didn’t know is that the black dots har a larger variance in noticability. In the end once understood they offered a replacement on a per case basis.

Which I do concede is not a great idea as capturing with a camera on either side is not a great way to demonstrate or recignize how bad due to cameras quality & magnification factors of cameras.

This I would disagree with as a lot of community discussions long before the Kickstarter resulted in features that were never part of the v1 demoed Jan 2017 but were present in v2. Like steam tracking & modularity. The 5k was also a community reccommendation. The 8kX was also came to be at community urging after it was realized tech at the time didn’t support likelihood of native 4k/eye (bridgechip, DP & GPUs). Now it looks much more promising. Seems like Steam tracking has been a mixed pro & con as we know with Valve’s many changes with LH mod cost & availability restrictions. But hey LH tracking was a good sales point.

Many of the discussions during & after KS closed influenced what we now hold. Many of the discussions themselves resulted in delays like Controller redesign from Vive wand clones with Thumbsticks to Knuckle like controllers; which no doubt also influenced Valve to make changes as well.

In many ways if pimax had not listened to the community as much as they had. They might not have had as good of a product but migh have had things completed by now. Custom tracking solution with vive like stick wands. No modular support & just an 8k with upscaling.

But they aimed higher due to us and while not there I am thankful in spite of the aggravation of wanting.

Btw 2 years is just a drop in the bucket of how long they have been working on this.

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Thanks @Milopapa for reminding me, I fixed the improper word.

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The team just wants to create the “beginnings” of a discussion and perhaps avoid some pitfalls. The team itself has been preparing for this for a while.

I actually found some aspects of the pitfall avoidance useful.

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Despite really wishing success for an open source effort, I feel I have to bring up a potentially very significant con in order to be able to proactively plan how to avoid the issue as much as possible.

Assuming any significant number of contributions and variations on the canonical versions of the main software components (maybe hardware too), Pimax should try to figure out how support will work with an open source approach. It’s only fair that they should only be responsible for resolving issues where the official components are used, but I can easily imagine situations where people will pick and choose to use variants of these official components and still bring their issues to Pimax to fix.

Why would people do this? Well, if they have put together a set of components that mostly work for them and which allow them to play the games they want in the most optimal way, or if these customized tools provide usability tweaks, for example, it seems quite likely that they would try to demand support from Pimax whenever possible (even if this means being sneaky or unfair) rather than relying on the perhaps non-existent or not-so-quick support from the actual authors of the customized components.

This situation could easily stretch Pimax’s support resources to the limit, resulting in a worse support experience for every Pimax customer. I’m not quite sure how abuse like this could be fully prevented (and possibly one could even look at it as signalling a thriving open source environment), but maybe building in some way to check if official components are used might help. Yes, this could be circumvented, but Pimax’s attitude should/could be mostly about educating people as to why debugging a canonical/official set of components first makes more sense before attempting to deal with issues introduced by variants of these.

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This topic is posted for collecting ideas from backers. Backers can always see something we didn’t noticed.

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They can just not support forks. It seems obvious to me that they’d only support features that had been merged into the trunk and released as a stable build by Pimax themselves.

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Do you have any details as to your open source roadmap yet? I’m hoping developing is going to be as simple as doing a fully recursive checkout on Github :slight_smile:

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