> Carmack is not a poor man, so a $10k bet or two (for charity, mind you) is more of a friendly wager than a make/break gamble.

The point was he seems to consistently grossly underestimate the difficulty of problems outside of his domain expertise.

He actually wrote the Netflix VR app for Oculus, and wrote a really detailed post on it: https://netflixtechblog.com/john-carmack-on-developing-the-n...

VR is not _at all_ outside his domain expertise.

The issue with VR is that it almost entirely doesn't require his type of expertise for it to succeed. It's almost entirely a hardware problem, in terms of cost, wearability/usability, quality, along with the other issues like nausea etc. None of which Carmack's vast expertise lends itself towards. Writing an app for Netflix isn't exactly using his skills.

We see this often with engineering types, many of us included. Vastly underestimating difficulty of challenging problems and naively believe they're simple to solve.

I would argue its mostly a hardware problem because lots of engineers, including Carmack, have already explored and solved a ton of the hard software problems e.g. https://web.archive.org/web/20140719085135/http://altdev.co/...

No one who correctly estimates the difficulty of writhing a game engine would ever start. Some things require optimism.

The two examples were self driving and VR.

> 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

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.

Facebook's VR plan seems to hinge on being "even more ubiquitous than mobile" <https://officechai.com/learn/mark-zuckerbergs-email-explaini...>, which is a level of constant use that 3D games don't really have.

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 :-)

[0]: https://www.gamedeveloper.com/design/q-a-carmack-reveals-the... (this predates the Quest, but it should give you an idea of the problems he was tackling)

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

With the amount of time he's put into VR over the last decade I think it's fair to say he's as much an expert as anyone else at this point.

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.

He also tried (is trying?) rockets.

Tried, (more or less) failed, and gave up (because it was costing too much, basically). Search for "Armadillo Aerospace".