John Carmack does several hour-long sessions at every annual Oculus Connect event (now called Facebook Connect). [1] [2]
He has often spoken about deeply optimizing virtual reality by peeling back all the software layers. From his annoyance at the Android's process scheduling on the GearVR to writing custom microcode for the Qualcomm chip's Digital Signal Processor to try and optimize playing PC games (over Oculus Link streaming) by encoding and transmitting video per scan line (instead of per frame).
He said that up until a few months before the original Quest launched they weren't even sure whether they could get inside-out optical tracking working to sufficient quality, but that they just continued to iterate on the algorithms until it worked well.
It's clear that most of Oculus' innovation are deep in the stack, seemingly pushed forward by the legendary John Carmack. Now that Carmack is merely the "consulting CTO" rather than working on these problems full-time there's real questions about whether Oculus' deep stack innovations will continue.
Oculus Quest is effectively a smartphone in many key ways, but it has several monochrome wide-angle cameras for tracking. Also unlike smartphones it has active cooling fans for improved thermals. It seems there's a million little things than come together to make Oculus Quest standalone VR way better than any phone-holder based virtual reality platform that I've used.
As far as an open-source custom firmware for Oculus Quest goes, I am unaware of any project that has yet cracked the bootloader to run unsigned code and then booted stock Android.
He has often spoken about deeply optimizing virtual reality by peeling back all the software layers. From his annoyance at the Android's process scheduling on the GearVR to writing custom microcode for the Qualcomm chip's Digital Signal Processor to try and optimize playing PC games (over Oculus Link streaming) by encoding and transmitting video per scan line (instead of per frame).
He said that up until a few months before the original Quest launched they weren't even sure whether they could get inside-out optical tracking working to sufficient quality, but that they just continued to iterate on the algorithms until it worked well.
It's clear that most of Oculus' innovation are deep in the stack, seemingly pushed forward by the legendary John Carmack. Now that Carmack is merely the "consulting CTO" rather than working on these problems full-time there's real questions about whether Oculus' deep stack innovations will continue.
Oculus Quest is effectively a smartphone in many key ways, but it has several monochrome wide-angle cameras for tracking. Also unlike smartphones it has active cooling fans for improved thermals. It seems there's a million little things than come together to make Oculus Quest standalone VR way better than any phone-holder based virtual reality platform that I've used.
As far as an open-source custom firmware for Oculus Quest goes, I am unaware of any project that has yet cracked the bootloader to run unsigned code and then booted stock Android.
[1] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=PMIDaomx0GA
[2] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=sXmY26pOE-Y