• ch00f@lemmy.world
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    5 months ago

    I worked in wearable electronics back in 2013. At the time, everyone was trying to crack wristworn heart rate monitors. It’s a challenging problem to solve: having to detect a faint color change in human skin while ignoring the massive shifts in ambient light from sunlight to shade all while bouncing around on a wrist.

    Different vendors had different solutions and couldn’t even agree on what color LED was best for illuminating the skin.

    Anyway, when the next generation of Nike Fuelband came out and didn’t include heart rate monitoring, I’ll never forget one of the comments I saw on a review.

    “Come on Nike, it’s not hard to add a heart rate monitor. Just use pulse tracking.”

    • sebinspace@lemmy.world
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      5 months ago

      Same with any game, “how hard is it to detect cheaters‽”. Turns out, very.

      Being an engineer, you’ll know that the amount of shit that has to go right to get a single pixel to glow is pretty crazy, some when armchair dickheads that have never written so much as a Hello World say shit like “it’s not that hard!”, it just…

      …listen, I’m not a violent man…

      • Dasus@lemmy.world
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        5 months ago

        …listen, I’m not a violent man…

        “Aaaand…?”

        “No that’s it. I’m not a violent man.”

      • Ms. ArmoredThirteen@lemmy.ml
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        5 months ago

        One of my college courses we hand wrote a scan line renderer and it took like a month before we could get a single blank triangle to show up isometrically. I knew it was going to be difficult but that was especially eye opening for me at the time

      • BruceTwarzen@kbin.social
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        5 months ago

        I hate that i’m guilty of that. I don’t know anything about that stuff, i’m just here for the jokes. I know it’s not easy, but my first reaction is always: “aaaaw c’mon, just make it so it doesn’t do the thing it’s not supposed to do.”
        But for real, i have a question. Why is it that every game even the newest most polished game in 2024 can’t get rid of clipping? Like in a character creator, slightly bigger top? Hair goes now through it. I remember playing overwatch for the first time and the game looked stellar and the characters interacted with way more things that i woul’ve imagined, but then you look closely and roadhogs anchor still clipps through his belt. Like what would happen if you drew a hard line saying: your clothes don’t go through anything anymore. Would the game just freak out? Would it just eat up processing power like crazy? Or is it just one of these not really a real problem so why looking for a solution kinda things?