ben drechsel

Fusion 360 and 3D printers are a great way to "invest" hours hours of your life designing esoteric things only you will ever use

"This island was ostensibly intended to be the province of the people – but it, too, has been irrevocably marred by Gehn's oppressive intrusions."

@BKD_MAGA_Nebr @krassenstein The Capitol police weren’t wearing combat fatigues 🤦‍♂️ They have proper uniforms, or (later) the black riot gear.

@krassenstein Ummmm the police are helping these people in.

Honest question: If this video was a woman, armed with a knife, breaking into the White House through a broken window as Biden was inside, and Secret service later shot her trying to enter the Oval Office after shouting multiple warnings, would you claim that they overreacted? This is Ashli Babbitt breaking into the Capitol on Jan 6th.

@AnditrustinHim @krassenstein There were no Army (or other armed service members) on official duty inside the Capitol. Not even the National guard, until much later.

@krassenstein The army guy helped her in…

@may935317 Good or bad, code always has a smell. No one wants to work with stinky code, except the person who wrote it & is immune. That’s not nothing.

@Jonathan_Blow I think the term 'aesthetic' is lodged too deep in your skull, when something that has nothing to do with being gazed at is quantified on that basis

Programmers who can add functionality, without making the codebase unnecessarily complicated, are *incredibly* valuable. If someone has properly absorbed this aesthetic and knows how to do it, I would hire that person on the spot regardless of perceived lack of other skillsets.

The question on every modern parent’s mind apple.news/AXkMB279cTmOaP…

@shoomlah Huge congrats!!!

Friday was my last day at Valve. Leaving a job full of people and projects you love is always hard, but I have a pretty good reason for it this time around: Next Monday is my first day at Cyan.

@toh_week @ATRightMovies Watched this at age 11, and I’m the oldest brother with two little sisters. Forever would still be too soon.

@ATRightMovies Amazing film that I’ll never have the courage to sit through again

What is the greatest film you will never watch again?

@dubenko_ @benz145 Seriously - not giving the unit a “throne” to ensure it’s charged, protected, updated, visible and accessible is a huge missed opportunity by Meta.

Of the 15 people closest people to me in my life (in my own generation) 7 out of 15 own a Quest 2. Not a single one still uses their headset on a regular basis, not even every 6 months. Meta either doesn't know why people like them quit, or doesn't seem to be doing much about it. From my observations of these people, the reason they don't use their headset anymore is because the friction for jumping into VR is too high for the payoff. Getting to the fun is far too cumbersome. Two ways to fix this: less clunk, and/or higher payoff. Has Meta moved the bar on either of those axes in the last 24 months?

@thedanclifton @tabloida_nai @benz145 Yes, yes, and yes. I’m a recovering UI designer and current UX engineer, who loves seeing fresh solutions to interaction challenges… but man, I have really come to dread putting my quest on, if it’s been more than a month or two. Always updates, bugs, and reinvention of wheels.

@EdKrassen @71Elvis77 Neal Stephenson has, read the first act of “Fall, or Dodge In Hell” . Incredible foresight, IMO

@71Elvis77 This is just the start. Just imagine where we will be in another 5 years.

Did you fall for it? Over the past several days, many large social media accounts have been posting this video (below on the left) alleging that it is of President Zelensky belly dancing. This is more misleading content being spread by Russian media and others. It is actually a video that has been modified to look like Zelensky. The real video, below on the right, actually depicts a man named Pablo Acosta. He’s a dancer from Argentina.

@perfectKeming Little do they know, that bland button was the designer’s intentional red herring to keep stakeholders attention away from fixing things that weren’t broken 😉

😎: Can you change the button color to green? 👨‍💻: What’s the problem we’re trying to solve? 😎: The button isn’t green. 👨‍💻: What if we try… 😎: Green.

@benz145 GREAT summary of this brilliantly subtle bit of audio experience engineering 👍

Apex Legends has a most simple but ingenious positional audio affordance that would work great in VR. Stick with me here: In Apex, each character has helpful voice lines that are called out automatically (ie: I'm taking damage, I'm healing, etc). For simplicity, let's imagine that instead of character voice lines these are the player's own voices. So in a match if your squadmates are near you and they talk, you hear their voices positionally (ie: if they're to the left you hear them from the left). Pretty standard. If they're a certain distance from you, the voices don't diminish in volume but instead apply a 'radio' filter. So this tells us just upon listening that the speaking player isn't close to us. This is still fairly standard, but important: rather than turning the volume down to indicate distance, we can still hear them clearly at full volume, but the radio filter means we still have the context that they aren't close. Now the simple but ingenious part: even when the speaking player is far away and their voice gets the 'radio' filter, their voice is still positional. Meaning even though their voice is ostensibly 'coming over the radio', you can still hear if it's left, right, front, or back of you. This turns out to be an incredibly useful tweak that most games ostensibly overlook because 'realism'. So if you hear an important call-out (ie: I'm taking damage), and it's over the radio and to your left, you intuitively have a sense that: A) the other player is in danger B) they aren't very close to you C) which direction you need to turn to find them D) you can still hear their voice at full volume so it's easy to hear what they're saying even if you're in the middle of a gunfight I played Apex for like 2 years before I even realized that I was intuitively following 'positional audio over radio' cues. Ok so why would this matter in VR game? Many VR games don't even use 'diminishing volume' on voices as an indicator of distance. This can mean that a player on the other side of the map sounds like they're right next to you, leading to situations where people say "where are you? I hear you but I can't find you." Some VR games do use diminishing volume but of course this has the problem of making the other person harder to hear, and if they're too far away, may cut them off entirely (in some large social VR contexts this is desired, but it's rarely needed otherwise). Especially because VR games often vary greatly in how much they use diminishing volume to indicate distance (ie: one game may drop the volume to 25% when a player is more than 15m away, while another may drop it to 25% when they are 100m away), I think having a 'radio' filter as a binary 'are they near or are they far' is a more intuitive way to communicate information to the player rather than trying to communicate 'exactly how far away they are'. A combination of these systems for VR would probably be best. For example: - Within 5m: full volume, positional audio - 5-20m: volume fall-off to a max of 50%, positional audio - 20m+: full volume radio filter, positional audio And while this might only seem useful in multiplayer VR games, Apex shows that even for NPC call-outs it's very useful. If an NPC in a town wants the attention of the player, their voice coming over the 'radio' with a positional indication tells the player which direction to head to find them. Or if you have NPC squad mates the same system continues to provide useful information to the player about where they are in relation to the player.

@Josh_Hawn @zbowling In every relevant way, their trackpad 2 is superior. Hard to believe they came from the same company and era, honestly.

@zbowling The Magic Trackpad is superior

I did a video on why Apple designed their mouse to charge from the bottom. Let me explain. I know it looks odd but there is an absolutely valid reason. Several actually. 1) the mouse charges rapidly. A single full charge will often last over a month. 5 minutes of charging is good for hours too in a pinch. 2) Lightning cables don’t have the stain relief to be used on a mouse that is flying around on your desk all day. Tips would break off and wear out. They would also have to greatly reinforce the lightning port. This would also be true if they used USB-C or micro-USB. People would wear cables down and they would break. Not a great user experience. Other mice like the Logitech G Pro mice have had to invent wild nonstandard USB cables just to reduce strain on the cable while in use in a wired mode (as pictured) Apple entirely avoided the problem. 3) the mouse is designed to be a wireless mouse and only wireless. It doesn’t support HID over USB protocol as if it were a wired. If the cable came out the front people might assume you can use it while plugged in with wireless disabled on your computer but you can’t. Sure they could add HID over USB but that would encourage you to use it as a wired mouse which is what they are entirely trying to avoid. 4) Apple is doing everything to try to make sure you don’t try and just leave the cable plugged in all the time. It’s better for the battery to discharge and recharge rather than stay fully charged because you leave the cable in 24/7. 5) wires get in the way and clutter up the aesthetics of using the mouse. They don’t want a cable dragging the mouse down to screw the up the free experience of using an untethered wireless device. They also want their computers to look clean and if some has brand new iMac with a wired Magic Keyboard and Mouse then that won’t look as sexy. Now the mouse is an ergo nightmare and that is valid criticism and why I hate this mouse. But charging from the bottom was thoughtful and well reasoned. Sure they could have designed a great wired mouse or even a combo mouse but they wanted to make a truly wireless mouse and that’s what they did. Remember the earlier version that looked identical took AAA batteries. This one now is just rechargeable but still the same mouse. Just because now it can use a cable to charge doesn’t mean it’s trying to be a wired mouse now.

@benz145 The worst is the stubby rigid wrist-stump that doesn’t flex when you hand rotates - I find it super unsettling at first, and then just an irritating constant immersion-breaker.

Glad to see this effort! I've been wanting to experiment with a system like this for ages (heuristic/procedural hand animations based on anatomical factors). Don't think they got the poses quite right but it's certainly better than the static 'hand that looks like you're holding an invisible computer mouse' pose of many VR games.

@Gwanatu Our brains know how to interpret a smooth blur as a single object in motion, no problems. The strobing LED leaves a trail of sharply-defined “ghosts”, which (my brain at least) has to re-focus on to resolve into a single source — just a quick double-take, but totally unnecessary.

@Gwanatu The OEM automotive applications make me really frustrated though, because of the safety issues they cause for other drivers. When your eye is “scanning”, those dimmed taillights or white LED running lights leave sharp “ghost” images instead of a soft motion blur…

My sensitivity to lighting and display flicker is getting worse and I honestly don't know how to handle this. So many things we use these days are powered by flickering LEDs and it's a huge problem. How do I live in a modern world when this affects me so negatively?

@Gwanatu It’s not hopeless… new style fluorescent tubes with higher quality electronic ballasts are okay, and LEDs with high CRI (I’m starting to see CRI be used in marketing, yay!) and proper drivers (not a low-hz PWM generator or one-legged AC “rectifier”) makes a massive difference

@shlykur @noazark The temporal color separation drives me nuts at first, but if I’m watching a film without a ton of high-contrast super-fast action I stop noticing after a bit. For video gaming or use as a PC monitor, the rainbow blur is always visible, for me.

@noazark Can you watch DLP projectors? it doesn't make me sick or anything, but I have to sort of keep still to not watch the individual colors

And few people believed me when, as a student and the then office worker, I said that fluorescent tube flicker made it nearly impossible for me to concentrate.

@noazark @shlykur Dang… I haven’t seen a laser projector in action yet, is the scanning that obvious?

@shlykur Not sure. Been awhile since I’ve knowingly watched a DLP projection. Latest laser-based IMAX 3D theatrical projectors are a problem for me, though.

@MatthewDR @benlambert08 @rachellee221 Guys keep it down, I live here and we’re trying to keep it a secret 🤐

@benlambert08 @rachellee221 The resort there with the golf course + floating green 👩‍🍳😘🤌

🧵Mini-Thread🪡: My family just took our annual trip from Seattle to remote Northern Idaho 🤠🥔. @elonmusk’s @TeslaCharging, FSD Beta, and @Starlink made it easier than ever before. Just a few years ago, there were only two Superchargers between Seattle and Spokane, now they are everywhere! 1/