Personally I think VR is outside the domain of expertise of 3D games and game engines. To think that VR is within that domain is exactly the error -- VR as an overall product requires different consumer behavior than buying a game for a PC you already have. It requires buying a new kind of device or buying into a whole new form of interaction. It requires remembering to use that device and think about what games you have for it. It requires engineers to ship high FPS and low lag to prevent nausea to a degree unheard of for PC gaming.
I am not a VR or 3D game expert, but even I can list other key differences. I bet you can too if you try. I think those are reasons to think VR is not really the same domain. I am curious what you think.
While I mostly agree that the hardware and UX challenges are mostly out of his domain,
> It requires engineers to ship high FPS and low lag to prevent nausea to a degree unheard of for PC gaming.
This is very much Carmack's speciality, and why his focus was on making mobile VR happen [0]. There are very few people who can outperform him at that, and most of them worked for Oculus :-)
Fair enough. I think the UX challenges are tougher than FPS, and secondarily the hardware challenges are also tougher than FPS, so I probably should have omitted the FPS mention in my comment to keep things focused. :D
He became expert in the domain enough to decide to walk away...
He's now working on a startup in the AGI field, which will also probably go nowhere for him.
He gets to work on things that excite him - what a place to be in life. We can all envy that - but he's not very good at gauging problems and consistently underestimates their difficulty/time-to-market.
> The point was he seems to consistently grossly underestimate the difficulty of problems outside of his domain expertise.
Carmack made 3d games and game engines. I don't think VR was outside his domain of expertise.
And for the self driving one, that bet is still on