Mouse cursor on top
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@anotherusername said in Place Your Bets: How Will Microsoft Screw This Up?:
I'm assuming that you can at least layer a mouse cursor on top of video even if you "smash it directly onto the screen".
The following has nothing whatsoever to do with the above, except that that brought to mind a
an acquaintance told me about some years back.He was an engineering student at the time, at one of the highest-ranking universities in the Netherlands, and as part of something he was working on, he regularly had to let a piece of software run on a bunch of experimental data. This software drew a window in the upper left corner of the desktop, taking up about a quarter of the screen, and put stuff into that window. Moving the mouse cursor over this window stood a good chance of corrupting the program’s output, because it apparently read the pixels on the screen as part of its calculations …
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I assume he knew how to work with pixels on screen but not with matrixes in memory?
Which makes me think: universities should probably give free software consulting hours for all engineering students (except the computer engineering ones of course).
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@anonymous234 said in Mouse cursor on top:
except the computer engineering ones of course
At least some CS students definitely need them, too...
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@Gurth said in Mouse cursor on top:
read the pixels on the screen as part of its calculations …
Tobe Faire, the experiment was "how many pixels are on the screen"...
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@Zerosquare said in Mouse cursor on top:
At least some CS students definitely need them, too...
They need psychological counselling instead…
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@anonymous234 said in Mouse cursor on top:
I assume he knew how to work with pixels on screen but not with matrixes in memory?
I may not have made clear that he didn’t write the program — it was the tool he was provided with to run the analysis, which would take several hours during which he was expected to also use the same computer to do other stuff on. I think he mentioned that during these times he’d always be hoping that Windows wouldn’t pop up a message box just as the program was looking at a part of the screen that would be covered by that.
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@Gurth said in Mouse cursor on top:
@anonymous234 said in Mouse cursor on top:
I assume he knew how to work with pixels on screen but not with matrixes in memory?
I may not have made clear that he didn’t write the program — it was the tool he was provided with to run the analysis, which would take several hours during which he was expected to also use the same computer to do other stuff on. I think he mentioned that during these times he’d always be hoping that Windows wouldn’t pop up a message box just as the program was looking at a part of the screen that would be covered by that.
It probably would've been fine if he'd run it in a VM. Unless you install the integration drivers, it definitely won't render a mouse pointer on top unless you direct input to the VM and intentionally move the pointer over its window. And if you do install the integration drivers, the mouse pointer will probably be rendered by the host instead of inside the VM anyway.
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Maybe later students did figure this out. It’s probably more likely someone did than that the software got fixed.
It still has me wondering how someone can have found it easier to write a program that scrapes the screen for values than go through an array for them, though.
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@Gurth said in Mouse cursor on top:
It still has me wondering how someone can have found it easier to write a program that scrapes the screen for values than go through an array for them, though.
I've heard of people doing this because they only had binaries of some software or had to work with software that didn't provide any programmatic access to it. And, in the end, screen-scraping is probably an easier "hack" to pull off than to inject custom code into the process that can locate and pull out the relevant data.
I had a group of students approach me with regards to the latter. They had a closed-source simulation software with minimal scripting capabilities that was scripted-hacked to render stereo images. They
wantedwere tasked to display that on a VR HMD. The closed-source software didn't know of any VR HMDs and (apparently) didn't support sophisticated-enough plugins to implement that properly. They went the screen-scraping route first, but that wasn't performing very well. Their idea was that it should be possible to hijack the rendered images directly on the GPU and hand them over to OpenVR or something without taking the detour over the system RAM. That turned out to be a bit more complicated than they imagined ... I never found out if they were able to pull it off in the end (project at a different department; I also never found out how they found me in the first place). Sounded like a fun project, though, even though the premise was a bit ... suspect.
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@cvi said in Mouse cursor on top:
And, in the end, screen-scraping is probably an easier "hack" to pull off than to inject custom code into the process that can locate and pull out the relevant data.
That's not that hard. The tools for hacking games make locating the place in the process to watch relatively easy, and that's very much the hardest part…
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@dkf Sure. But it's not the sort of thing that you'd normally learn to do in a course or something. On the other hand, most people are at least aware that you can take screenshots, so attempting automating that is not such long shot.
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@cvi said in Mouse cursor on top:
But it's not the sort of thing that you'd normally learn to do in a course or something.
Neither is VR.
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@Gąska said in Mouse cursor on top:
Neither is VR.
Going from drawing onto a flat screen to stereo VR is conceptually not exactly a huge step. The basic version is something along the lines of "do all your rendering twice".
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@cvi how easy it is has nothing to do with how common it is to study at college.
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@Gąska said in Mouse cursor on top:
how easy it is has nothing to do with how common it is to study at college.
What I mean is that if you have a computer graphics course, you know how to do VR. There's nothing essentially new to it. What exactly do you want to study about it?
But perhaps I'm mistaken in my original proposition. If you get to learn how a debugger works under the hood, you should at least know that it's possible to poke around in other processes' memory. I guess people learn how a debugger works?
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@cvi said in Mouse cursor on top:
@Gąska said in Mouse cursor on top:
how easy it is has nothing to do with how common it is to study at college.
What I mean is that if you have a computer graphics course, you know how to do VR. There's nothing essentially new to it. What exactly do you want to study about it?
By study, I meant appear in curriculum. Whether this happens is completely independent of difficulty, popularity and relevance to other topics.
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@Gąska said in Mouse cursor on top:
By study, I meant appear in curriculum.
Ok, I'm actually curious (I'm occasionally involved in teaching computer graphics). We mention VR in passing. We don't elaborate on it, because there really isn't much to say about it. Some students end up doing VR related projects later on, but that's pretty much up to the individuals and their interests. Does that count? If not,
what's missingwhat would you like/have liked to learn about it?But to give you an analogy: in maths you learn (at some early point) about integration. But you're not shown each individual integral that you will ever encounter - you're expected to be able to take the general knowledge and apply it to specific problems. Same thing here (IMO).
Edit: rephrased slightly.
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@cvi wait, where did you get the idea that I think there should be more VR in college? I just said that currently, it's just as extracurricular as capturing rendered output straight from VRAM.
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@Gąska said in Mouse cursor on top:
@cvi wait, where did you get the idea that I think there should be more VR in college?
Ok, fair enough. My bad, I misunderstood.
I just said that currently, it's just as extracurricular as capturing rendered output straight from VRAM.
As far as my original example goes, the VR part (=rendering stereo images) was already done, so I'm not sure why you're even comparing the two.
Regardless, my impression is that students actually learn significantly less of the the under-the-hood stuff, like how a debugger works, how you can inspect running applications, that you can intercept various calls and so on. Unfortunately, to quite a few that I encounter, even a function call is pure magic (there are of course exceptions every now and then, and it varies a bit from university to university). I also really wouldn't consider VR extracurricular these days (5+ years ago? Probably).
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@cvi said in Mouse cursor on top:
I also really wouldn't consider VR extracurricular these days (5+ years ago? Probably).
Wow, your universities progress fast. 5 years ago, VR wasn't even an acronym.
Meanwhile in Poland, we're still taught J2ME and pre-STL C++.
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@Gąska said in Mouse cursor on top:
Wow, your universities progress fast. 5 years ago, VR wasn't even an acronym.
5 years ago the older researchers made fun of people for thinking VR was a cool new thing. Apparently is was a cool new thing like 20-25 years ago.
Meanwhile in Poland, we're still taught J2ME and pre-STL C++.
It varies. A lot. Old crusty people stuck in their old crusty ways exist everywhere, unfortunately (or perhaps more realistically, people who just don't care). The CG courses I know are thought by people who are in the field of CG, and thus need to keep up anyway. Doesn't mean that all courses are as .... well-maintained.
(But I've not heard of anybody teaching pre-STL C++ in like a decade. My condolences.)
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@Gąska we've got kids doing VR programming in high school. As a club. /Rich-kids
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@cvi said in Mouse cursor on top:
@Gąska said in Mouse cursor on top:
Wow, your universities progress fast. 5 years ago, VR wasn't even an acronym.
5 years ago the older researchers made fun of people for thinking VR was a cool new thing. Apparently is was a cool new thing like 20-25 years ago.
I know the technology behind VR dates back at least to the 80s. But to my best knowledge, it wasn't called "VR" until around Oculus 2.
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@Gąska The term VR/virtual reality certainly predates Oculus. I'm relatively sure that it was around in the 80s already.
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@cvi To give an example, Nintendo named their Virtual Boy console after it, and that was 1995.
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Wikipedia says "virtual reality" dates back to the 1930s in a French theater context and made its way to English along with "artificial reality" in the 1960s.
My first "VR" experience dates back to the 80s: arcade Battlezone with its viewfinder and wireframe tanks. If you want a more direct reference, though, VRML was something I rarely got working in the 90s browsers.
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@cvi said in Mouse cursor on top:
@Gąska The term VR/virtual reality certainly predates Oculus.
Virtual reality - yes. But VR as an acronym?
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@Gąska said in Mouse cursor on top:
But VR as an acronym?
Seems likely enough - virtual reality is a bit of a mouthful. Also see above example of VRML, which includes the VR acronym.
If you're hoping for references... well
. I'm currently on mobile, after all.
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@JBert said in Mouse cursor on top:
Let's look back to what I said at first...
@Gąska said in Mouse cursor on top:
5 years ago, VR wasn't even an acronym.
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@Gąska said in Mouse cursor on top:
5 years ago, VR wasn't even an acronym.
The title of the show refers to the degree of immersion the protagonist experiences in virtual reality.
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@loopback0 okay, I was wrong, I admit.
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@loopback0 said in Mouse cursor on top:
@Gąska said in Mouse cursor on top:
5 years ago, VR wasn't even an acronym.
The title of the show refers to the degree of immersion the protagonist experiences in virtual reality.
1994 (TV series)
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@Gąska said in Mouse cursor on top:
But VR as an acronym?
omfg
This is a show that is great for what it was, but would also be super-ripe for a reboot/updating.
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ITT: several pages of people posting various links about VR.5, all mad at me for not knowing TV shows that went out of fashion before I was born.
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@Gąska said in Mouse cursor on top:
for not knowing TV shows that went out of fashion before I was born.
Lucky for you there's lots of
s around here! (I didn't remember either of those shows)
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@loopback0 said in Mouse cursor on top:
. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/VR.5
The title of the show refers to the degree of immersion the protagonist experiences in virtual reality.
Also just remembered IEEE VR:
Since 1993, the IEEE Virtual Reality conference has been the premier international venue for the presentation of research results in the broad area of virtual reality (VR).
It still exists.
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@dcon said in Mouse cursor on top:
1994 (TV series)
That only aired for two years?
Man, my childhood memories really stretched out those two years.
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@billhead And/or whichever channel you watched it on ran repeats for a year or two more.
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@cvi said in Mouse cursor on top:
5 years ago the older researchers made fun of people for thinking VR was a cool new thing. Apparently is was a cool new thing like 20-25 years ago.
I played a VR game in 1992, in the Tivoli amusement park in Kopenhagen.
You stood in a kind of ring, probably to stop you from wandering/falling over, wearing goggles and with a controller in your hand, that had buttons for walking and shooting. The game itself was multiplayer (but I don’t recall how many — probably four), and the idea was to shoot the other players. The game “world” consisted of a number of platforms with chessboard pattern, connected to each other by walkways/stairs, all floating in simple blackness.
I remember looking down over the edge of a platform and despite the very simple graphics even by 1992 standards, having a feeling like being stood on the edge of a roof and that I should be careful not to fall off.
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@Gąska said in Mouse cursor on top:
I know the technology behind VR dates back at least to the 80s. But to my best knowledge, it wasn't called "VR" until around Oculus 2.
The game I just described above was known back then as a virtual reality game, abbreviated VR at the time already too. ISTR “VR” was moulded into the outside of the goggles, but I might have that wrong after 26+ years :)
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@Lorne-Kates said in Mouse cursor on top:
@Gąska said in Mouse cursor on top:
But VR as an acronym?
omfg
This is a show that is great for what it was, but would also be super-ripe for a reboot/updating.
No. I saw this show, as my treacherous memory now relates, and now I am mad at you. If this cannot be left dead at least let it eternal lie.
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@Gąska said in Mouse cursor on top:
ITT: several pages of people posting various links about VR.5, all mad at me for not knowing TV shows that went out of fashion before I was born.
Yet you get upset at things like "VR wasn't an acronym 5 years ago!"
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@Tsaukpaetra what?
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@Tsaukpaetra what
?
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@Gąska said in Mouse cursor on top:
@Tsaukpaetra what
?The ones that are affected by your cursor being over the window, obviously.
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@Tsaukpaetra you forgot to switch accounts before posting.
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@Gąska said in Mouse cursor on top:
@Tsaukpaetra you forgot to switch accounts before posting.
Oh, fuck!
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@Gąska said in Mouse cursor on top:
Wow, your universities progress fast. 5 years ago, VR wasn't even an acronym.
The only remaining academically-interesting parts of VR are to do with studying human-computer interaction, which is very much at the psychology/physiology end of CS. Virtually all the rendering side of things is now a commercially-solved problem if you have the budget.
VR.5 - Wikipedia
V.R. Troopers (TV Series 1994–1996) ⭐ 5.6 | Action, Adventure, Family
