AJ Campbell

XR Dev, creator of former work: Spotify App for Magic Leap, XR Tech Lead @ Technicolor

[AJ Campbell @SciFiUIGuy]

The WIMP paradigm has ruled all screens for nearly forty years. In the 20-teens, we began moving off of screens, but not off of WIMP. 2021 is a good year to fix that. Let's do this!

[AJ Campbell @SciFiUIGuy]

@BabaDev_ Text is explodable down to each byte. Git won't resave the whole file on each commit. It'll store a delta of only the bytes that changed. However, it only works on text-based assets. Turn on Git LFS for images/videos/3D assets... these won't delta... the repo does balloon.

[AJ Campbell @SciFiUIGuy]

@samongaro_ Some of column A, some of column B. I've known seniors so good w/ expertise so niche that they'll stay employed regardless, but they're a minority. Likewise, I think most juniors with good agentic habits have an Iron Man suit compared to our scrawny t-shirts at their age.

[AJ Campbell @SciFiUIGuy]

@justinryanio I believe it, but it's kinda similar to a car audio sales guy saying "you said you liked our 7.1 surround sound system so we upgraded you to 108 speakers! There are five in each seat. You're welcome!"

[AJ Campbell @SciFiUIGuy]

@impiousimp It's harsh. I don't think anyone is stupid for hating AI, but I do think they're caught up in a propaganda-charged hysteria. That can happen to anyone of any intelligence, but it is true that the world will leave such people behind.

[AJ Campbell @SciFiUIGuy]

@ckaleiki This is CI/CD. Anyone who wants it can have an agent set it up via a local spare computer, on-prem server, or cloud VM. It'll incur monthly costs cloud-side vs. hardware cost upfront on-prem unless you have the hardware already.

[AJ Campbell @SciFiUIGuy]

@rayjt9 I understand that, among indie devs, artists more than coders take the brunt of gamer slings/arrows over AI slop, but art IS code. Code is art. Devs and artists will one day admit that we all use AI for every part of the pipeline. There is no other competitive way.

[AJ Campbell @SciFiUIGuy]

For anyone on the bandwagon of "I can't stand AI, but it's okay if it's only used for 2 lines of code..."

...where's the line?

There is no line. Use modern tools artfully: good game. Use modern tools to fart slop: you're a slop dev. It was true before AI. Still true.

[AJ Campbell @SciFiUIGuy]

@shinyflvres I would go further and argue it's semantics whether one line versus every line is GenAI. People are grasping at straws trying to figure out if they can hang the slop on the neck of an identifiable art OR dev process. They can't.

[AJ Campbell @SciFiUIGuy]

@UnrealSensei It's sad, really. AI is a tool for both artists and devs. Steam made everyone put the "AI" scarlet letters on their games, which guarantees trash-heep sales. The badge of shame only hurts scrupulous devs. It does nothing to stop shady slop.

[AJ Campbell @SciFiUIGuy]

@SadlyItsBradley Splitting SFX stems from an ambi track is the same pain as for any condenser x4. AI tools can do it pretty well 80% of the time, but x4? They can also mess w/ HRTF cues if they're upstream in the signal chain (they usually are) so HRTFs OR stems, not both, is the easy way.

[AJ Campbell @SciFiUIGuy]

@SadlyItsBradley I did a lil recordist work when I first got into VR. Ambisonics are fine for 360 video that has little/no budget for sound design IF you're okay with that fast-and-loose get-the-shot-on-the-go documentary feel. Otherwise, I highly recommend foley instead for most SFX.

[AJ Campbell @SciFiUIGuy]

@joedevon I believe the only people who can deal with the downsides of AI are cybersec devs armed with armies of agents that are trained better than their black-hat rivals. It's the new antivirus software. All other regulation attempts are moot. The genie is out of the bottle.

[AJ Campbell @SciFiUIGuy]

@jfwong I agree witch-hunting devs over AI slop does suck and is a waste of time. GenAI is passing the Turing Test readily in the hands of capable devs. It's only slop in the hands of hacks. HOWEVER, code and art use the same GenAI bc code is art and art is code. Only the medium changes.

[AJ Campbell @SciFiUIGuy]

@_LucasRizzotto @LinusEkenstam I think that's his point. Human brain power on one porject may have apexed. From now on, fewer people + agents can do the same work. He may also be addressing that 10 slightly smaller projects each w/ 1/10th team size may have been better resource allocation of AAA talent.

[AJ Campbell @SciFiUIGuy]

@justinryanio @specs They look really cool. I just wish they were OpenXR-friendly.

[AJ Campbell @SciFiUIGuy]

Hear me out: Unreal Blueprints... not Turing-complete. Why not? Bc programmers hate VPLs. Why? Bc 🍎-to-🍎 they're verbose vs. text code. What if they weren't though? What if you could zoom out and see the whole app's execution flow w/ perfect class/method/property clarity?

[AJ Campbell @SciFiUIGuy]

@SadlyItsBradley But doesn't it follow that if parallax holds up on that frame up to 90 degrees that it's likely you can just snap that frustum to your face and make it a full VR port?

[AJ Campbell @SciFiUIGuy]

In XR, we slave over nanosecond allocation improvements to ensure 90fps, but then we make the user walk across the room for 5.7 seconds to grab an item on a shelf.

[LaurieWired @lauriewired]

UX latency is the most frustrating (lack of) advancement in computing over the last ~50 years.

IBM, way back in the 80s, found that user productivity shot up *exponentially* as system response time dropped. The "Doherty Threshold" was defined as ~400 milliseconds; the maximum amount of tolerable UX latency before interrupting user flow state.

It's unbelievable how many modern operating systems (*cough* win11) violate this threshold constantly.

Literally all you need to do as a Dev is pay attention. Add a "Doherty Threshold" to your test suite. There's so many different profiling tools, and especially with how good models are, really no excuse. Sure, some stalls are unavoidable, but that's when you pull out other UX tricks to at least give the illusion of responsiveness.

Crazy how much vintage computing hardware feels immeasurably more responsive despite having thousands of times less overall performance.