Comment by guenthert
4 hours ago
> Everything in modern computing is slow
Nonsense. Embedded systems, often event driven, improved as did the rest of the computing landscape (perhaps at a tad slower pace). HST has been a major driver on low latency computing in the data center. And then there are of course robotics and military applications ...
I have 5 programs open right now - Firefox, Visual Studio, Word, Photoshop and a terminal.
Out of these 5, only Firefox loads faster than it did on a 512MB Windows XP machine 20 years ago, the other 4 are at least a few times slower.
VR is at the intersection of low latency, high throughput, high compute, flexibility and affordable prices.
Embedded systems are often not flexible. They are often designed to do just one thing, like driving an engine, and may run the exact same software for their entire life, which may be decades. They are often limited in term of general computing requirements too.
I don't know HST, but it seems to be similar to embedded: single, highly constrained application, maybe more compute, and I would guess that affordability isn't even on the menu.
Meta VR is consumer software, running on consumer hardware, it runs third party apps, with all the flexibility that is asked of PCs. You can't just put your own realtime OS and claim the entire system for your own specific application.