[Ask Hackaday: Is Anyone Sad Phone VR Is Dead
Everardo Laboy
Shields are usually added for radiated emissions control, or to shield noise coming into the device and affecting it. The majority of the time it is to stop your device affecting others, and might explain why it has not caused you issues in the past.
That makes me wonder how quality of phone correlates with recording in tallscreen. Are people with good taste in phone (at least as far as camera is concerned) more or less likely to record for over-under eyeball configuration?
I go with Fred here: I am NOT sure this would ease the problem. And it is not about the connection to the circuit board where you usually can do epoxy backfill. It is the Flip-Chip attachment: tiniest pads instead of the wire bonds of former ICs with much less pins.
Even if they went with fully flexible ICs, which would bend with the movement and thermal expansion instead of cracking, they would still see issues with the interconnects by nature of flip chip. Epoxy back-fill could mitigate it, but then you just have another thermal stress point to worry about.
Right, smart move! Instead of having a hardware failure unrelated to phone updates, you can have hardware failures plus the joy of having your phone hacked by a 14-year-old script kiddy. I just cannot say how clever I think you are!
Getting offtopic but I saw a really interesting speech at a mining conference once. Apparently after analyzing a ton of real-world reliability data, they determined that operators should double or even triple the service interval for heavy machinery (mine trucks etc.) because at the recommended service intervals, the chances of destroying an engine through maintenance error was much higher than was justified by the slightly longer service life.
I was on the phone with LG support for over 8 hours at various times, 14 emails, for supervisors and then they finally promised to send me a refund for my 5X. 38 business days. Horrible customer service by LG. I will never buy another LG product in my life.
If anyone has a 5X that is still working and its still under Google warranty (mine was bought from GoogleFi and it was at the 10 month mark), should just contact them and tell the support that the phone is problematic, name any problem you want, they will replace it with brand new one for free, with no hustle at all.
My 5x failed in bootloop while I was overseas three months ago, just as I was about to board my last plane home. Not a fun way to spend 14 hours of traveling! Google kindly replaced the phone even though it was just past the one year mark, but in the meantime I took the device to a local phone repair shop. Nothing I had read about online worked: whacking it, opening it up and resetting all the connections, etc. They had it for weeks and bless them, were actually able to fix it so I could recover my full-res photos and videos (not the resized Google Photos version). Apparently it was a connection to the power button, which specifically had to be microsoldered back, and took so long because it was so finicky that several attempts failed. Using the replacement 5x now, warily awaiting the day I am forced to upgrade to a Pixel.
My Nexus 5X did this less than 8 months after I bought it. I was in the process of applying an update, the phone got extremely hot and suddenly shut off, followed by a never ending boot loop. Tried doing a reflow on the main board as well as other fixes.. Nothing worked so I sent it into LG for warranty repair. They sent it back with a note starting a power regulator was to blame.. Cracked open the case and find they had completely replaced the main board after flashing the chip with my original IMEI.
My first one died last August with this issue. My replacement refurbished died this week. The day before it died I dropped it three feet into carpet and had no visible external damage. The next morning it stopped working after watching a snapchat video. I thought it was a lost cause due to the original purchase being soon after launch but I will give it a try.
I told the rep about the bootloading forums and stated that I read in some cases a replacement was issued as it is a known manufacturing problem. Even if you have data on your phone you want to retrieve I would suggest you make the call right away. Replacement delivery is 3-7 business days and you have 21 days too return your busted device. So you can tinker away while your waiting for delivery.
I read through this and other posts and realised the problem is the thermal compound between the processor and heat sink. Got the compound replaced and my phone is working perfectly. Only issue I got as a slight screen burn at the top area where I guess the processor is.
In short, phone-based VR had constraints that limited just how far it could go when it came to delivering a VR experience, and these constraints kept it from being viable in the long run. Here are some of the reasons smartphone-based VR hit the end of the road:
The good news is that the headsets are fairly simple devices, and easily tampered with. Since they include optics, putting a screen inside them is about all it takes to make a basic head-mounted display. We have seen a few projects that take advantage of this, like this remote-controlled telepresence tank which uses a smartphone as the display but eschews any phone VR SDK, and this homebrewed system using a small HDMI display in lieu of a phone. Perhaps older phones that retain VR compatibility could find a home as displays for special projects.One thing that may help is that Google just announced the open sourcing of Google Cardboard. What do you think? Will these old headsets be good for anything, or will they join empty 3D printer filament spools as semi-hoarded tech junk?
Now the problem is, since the visual environment is different when you view the world through VR goggles, once you take them off, you tend to bump into things and generally lose your balance for a moment before you re-adjust. This creates a workplace hazard where the technician working inside a wind turbine takes their VR glasses off and promptly stumbles out of the access hatch to their death.
No ones is sad because no one made a great VR headset. Poor optics, poor screens, poor headset design. Everyone wanted to make something as cheap as they could/ least amount of engineering time involved. Had someone made a great one i would wear it 24/7. A good VR headset should look just like sitting in a dark theater. You should be able to move your eyes wherever and not see optic issues, or the dividing of the screen.
Oh, totally. I kind of call it the Fisher-Price style of web design. Every icon is huge and childish, every message to the user is delivered through a honkin enormous modal or #dickbar that takes up your entire screen. Scroll and stuff will chase you around, perhaps changing height and scoot back and forth. Things will disappear when you scroll down and reappear if you ever scroll up to re-read a line. The screen will dim out and ask you to sign up for a newsletter that literally nobody but bots has ever put a real email address into. Landscape-oriented screens are totally forgotten.
The above comment (and the top one) deserve upmods. I also am an old man who laments the simultaneous bloat and loss of functionality of the modern web. We seem to have forgotten all the lessons we learned in the 1960s-80s about how humans interact with computers.
idk, in home streaming is a thing now. game on your own rig stream video to some device somewhere on your network. i tried it with a raspi3 and the latency was kind of shitty (probably because of the slow wifi). a production phone might be better at this (not that i would know anything about that as i do not use cell phones). if you can send your games to your phone, why not then send stereo content? then you just need google cardboard. seems like all the parts are in place to cobble something together.
Unfortunately, latency is incredibly important in VR to avoid issues of nausea and such. And it would be bi-directional latency, since the headset has to send head angle and position data to the computer, then the computer has to render a frame and send the stereo video data back. Might be fast enough with 5g, I have no idea. That might be the ticket.
yea i thought about that. latency needs to be improved for this kind of hacked together kit to work. eventually they want to run all games on cloud servers where you need but the thinnest of clients to play, so its bound to improve on the latency issues if they want any hope of success (i couldnt even get good performance across my living room, much less several states). probably through custom high performance codecs with hardware acceleration. a wider adoption of faster wifi standards will certainly help.
Samsung and Google both should have been ashamed to release GearVR, Cardboard and DayDream in the first place. The last thing this highly experimental market needed was a bunch of imitators jumping on the bandwagon with the VR equivalent of snake oil.
Tech aint here yet. Phone screen Resolution not here yet. Phone processing power not here yet. Neither in graphics or raw power. Even a decent high end desktop rig with ridiculous expensive powerful vid card isnt capable of much but easily magnitude better than the best phone. But high spec phone is good for some useable quality VR games and basic modeling. I dont have any intent on giving up on phone VR completely and not in any way surprised of/by dropouts.
If someone should come up with killer App for VR phone see how fast the tone changes. Also need to add that present interface using gyro/accelerometer and screen menus is poor and often poorly implemented. Daydream at least had a chuck interface but it too wasnt intuitive and couldnt change environment manipulation . im not partial to having whiplash or bumping into things whilst being effectively blindfolded. I do wonder if someone is collecting Data on the number of emergency room visits that can be directly related to Phone VR incidents.