• 3 Posts
  • 1.04K Comments
Joined 1 year ago
cake
Cake day: August 14th, 2023

help-circle





  • OP posted to a movies community about Tom Cruise’s narrative troubles, and how he changed them in the eye of the public.

    Your comment recommends two movies that don’t have anything to do with Cruise, and a third, from 1988, with Cruise decades prior to his narrative issues.

    You didn’t offer an explanation of why we should watch the movies, or even mention that Cruise was in the third, which is odd since you mentioned stars from the others. It came off as you ordering us to watch unrelated movies that don’t have anything to do with the article.

    That just makes it feel very out of place. A recommendation list even with Tom in one of the movies feels like a sort of social non-sequitor in this type of thread.

    That gives a similar kind of energy that a dad trying to search for celluloid clitorist couplings has when he mistakenly types into Facebook before confidently hitting Post.

    Had you said:

    “Tom Cruise was excellent in The Color of Money which was a sequel to the wildly successful and excellent The Hustler staring Paul Newman, and despite Cruise’s personal issues later in his career I recommend everyone see both films! Also watch The Sting if you enjoy Newman’s performance in The Hustler since he’s excellent in both.”

    Or something like that, we would have all followed your thought train from the article.




  • Fantastic list!

    If you’re ok with including AI art generating apps on the list then check out Draw Things.

    It’s free, runs the models only locally on your device, and collects no data/has an excellent clear privacy policy. It also does it in a fairly user-friendly way.

    I have been extremely blown away by how capable it is. You can import Checkpoints, LoRa, Embeddings, and other Stable Diffusion-based things downloaded from huggingface, and civitai, likely other places. You can mix models and train LoRa. It has recently added API and http server functionality so you can automate image generation or plug it into other apps. It even can generate up to 25-frames of video, and it includes an exporter that does video frame interpolation.

    It runs on iPhone, iPad, Mac, and the iPad version runs on VisionOS. I take a photo with my phone and make crazy variations of art with it without having internet access or paying a dime more than my expensive device already cost me.

    With a separate app I can turn things I generate into stereo photos or video and see them in 3D on my headset.

    I can also zoom in and enhance parts of photos, or upscale them in ways that hallucinate reasonable details.

    I feel like I’m one hoverboard away from the future I was promised as a kid!

    I’ve been so enamored with this app recently that it’s making me consider a career change, so I apologize if I’m coming off like an advertisement.









  • I have used and worked on/with/owned quite a few VR headsets, yeah. Not a comprehensive reviewer-worthy amount, but I’ve been working on, or playing with, a VR headset since 2015, and I do consider myself to be an enthusiast.

    Currently I own a Valve Index and a PSVR 2 along with my Vision Pro. Those two haven’t gotten use in a long while, whereas I use my Vision Pro a lot every day.

    I don’t have a lot of experience with Quest 2, 3, or Pro, because Meta’s whole account debacle caused me to give my original quest away to a homeless friend of mine, which he sold for child support money, I think. Not a fan or Meta as a company in general.

    I am a slight fan of Apple as a company, and by lemmy standards, I qualify as a rabid lunatic fanboy of Apple, so take it with a grain of salt, but…

    The Vision Pro is a lot more of a comprehensive product than any of the other devices I’ve used, in ways that probably don’t matter to most VR enthusiasts. The surprisingly gripping features of it have nothing to do with gaming whatsoever, and everything to do with art, content, media, and productivity.

    The main hobby I’ve been using it for daily is learning how to create 3D videos using Stable Diffusion. The huge bonus for this is all of the iPad apps that mostly just work without issue out of the box sprinkled with some Vision Pro specific apps.

    Without leaving the headset or relying on an external device, I can use Draw Things to generate a high resolution image, generate up to 25 frames of video with that image as a starting point, save the image sequence out to a directory, where I can use LumaFusion to combine sequences into a video. If I need to I can use waifu2x to uprez, but that takes forever, so I usually don’t.

    I can export the video and drag and drop it into Spatial Media Toolkit, futz with the depth setting, and output an AI generated spatial video. I can use Spatialify to output a SBS video if I want to at that point, but usually just keep them as spatial videos.

    Aside from that specific workflow, It’s also the best 2D and 3D video watching headset experience. Being able to dial my environment in to drown out a the rest of a cross-country flight and watch Mad Max: Fury Road in 3D while it reflects on a lake in front of me, the size of a cinema screen, is both magical, and something that I hope even Quest users get to experience in some capacity on their platform.

    It comes in handy, too, when I want to watch or do something different than the bf is watching on the tv.

    I also am benefiting from the Apple ecosystem, since I own an m1 macbook and an iPhone 15 pro.

    I love being able to capture spatial videos and panoramas and then experience them in headset later. Airdropping files between devices also lets me offload longer video processing to them, since waifu2x and handbrake on the mac work better for uprezzing and Spatial Media Toolkit has a native-ish Mac release.

    For generative AI Draw Things is also on the mac and iPhone, but I’m learning ComfyUI since it seems way more powerful. And I use Screens 5 to vnc from my headset or phone, or I use the native virtual display if I’m by the mac itself.

    My only experience using a Quest 2 was recently when a friend came over and we spent an hour trying to get it to work, resetting and rebooting over and over, before finally just giving up on pairing one of the two controllers, and we used the ios app to launch the browser to watch some 180 stereo videos. It wasn’t a good experience, but I’m sure it would be once it’s setup.

    But I can’t really knock it too much, since trying to share the Vision Pro is the worst part of the device. The best option is to SharePlay to a mac or Apple TV, since the whole guest mode thing takes too long. And while I won’t fly without my Vision Pro again, I wouldn’t feel comfortable bringing it to a friend’s place. That thing’s expensive as hell, and I don’t want someone to drop it or for it to get stolen.




  • Watching the 3D version of Mad Max: Fury Road with it reflecting off the lake in the Mount Hood environment while flying cross country sold me on never flying without a VR headset again. It was one of the most comfortable flights I’ve had and one of the more enjoyable and memorable movie watching experiences despite having seen the movie before.

    On the way back I was able to play the inflight entertainment in headset, and the wifi was good enough to stream video so I watched RuPaul content on youtube and Wow Presents Plus while texting friends. It was also a solid experience.

    No motion sickness in either case, but also I didn’t play any games or anything that usually makes someone motion sick in VR. This was all on my Vision Pro, so hopefully it works as well on the Quest headsets.