virtual reality

Pete Hunt explains why React's virtual DOM was built, how it compares with databinding-style systems, and what it means for future browser technology. Recorded at FutureJS 2014 in Barcelona.

John Carmack's long QuakeCon 2012 keynote, a free-ranging talk covering software engineering, game platforms, game streaming, and his early head-mounted display and VR work.

John Carmack speaks at UMKC's 2017 commencement event about the difficulties of VR, especially end-to-end latency across hardware and software. He covers why latency and buffering matter and how nausea is addressed.

John Carmack's keynote at Facebook Connect 2021, where he speaks candidly about VR, Quest, and Meta's metaverse plans. He pushes back on hype and discusses retention and latency.

John Carmack's roughly 90-minute keynote at Oculus Connect 2014, covering mobile VR and the Gear VR work, followed by audience questions.

Michael Abrash of Valve explains what affordable VR hardware will be capable of within a couple of years, and describes a prototype showing what that level of hardware can do.

Brian Karis's SIGGRAPH 2021 talk explains how Unreal Engine 5's Nanite virtualized geometry works. It covers mesh import, the data structures, streaming, decompression, culling, software and hardware rasterization, and shading.

A talk by Yuri Iozzelli at a WebAssembly meetup on CheerpX, an x86 virtual machine running in the browser. It uses a JIT compiler that emits WebAssembly at runtime to run real native applications. It covers the architecture and demos such as porting a multiplayer C++ game.

A QCon London 2020 talk by Tesla engineers on the architecture of Tesla's Virtual Power Plant. It covers aggregating distributed batteries and solar with vertically integrated hardware and software across cloud and edge.

Dan Bornstein's Google I/O 2008 talk on the internals of Dalvik, the virtual machine that runs Android code. It covers the motivation for its design, the dex format and its register-based interpreter, plus tips for writing code that suits the platform.

Cliff Click, author of HotSpot's JIT compiler, shares hard-won advice for people writing virtual machines at the VMSS16 workshop. Topics include interpreters, JITs and performance lessons.

Cognitive scientist Donald Hoffman argues in this TED talk that evolution shaped perception to track fitness rather than truth. He uses evolutionary simulations and the Australian jewel beetle as examples.

A surreal multimedia TEDxSarasota performance by Magic Leap founder Rony Abovitz, held on 12/12/12, mixing performance art with talk about imagination and creativity.

Neuroscientist Anil Seth argues in this TED talk that perception is a controlled hallucination: the brain constantly predicts the world and our shared agreement is what we call reality. He also touches on the construction of the self.

Roman Elizarov compares Kotlin Coroutines with OpenJDK Project Loom virtual threads, looking at their design goals and how those translate into different implementations and tradeoffs. He addresses how the two can coexist.

Bryan Cantrill's Papers We Love talk on FreeBSD Jails and Solaris Zones, tracing how OS-level virtualization grew out of chroot and the limits of the traditional UNIX security model.

Ron Pressler's Curry On 2015 talk arguing that imperative languages should not be polluted with pure functional concepts like monads. He favors simple blocking code over non-blocking styles.

David MacKay's TEDxWarwick talk uses basic arithmetic to show how much land and energy renewables would need to power a country like the UK. It explains the limits of sustainable options and why they should still be pursued.

Eric Brandwine's AWS re:Invent 2015 session on how Amazon VPC networking works. It covers the problems the design solved, why traditional approaches do not scale, and the mechanisms used for customer isolation and VPC endpoints.

Bryan Cantrill's Velocity NYC 2015 talk argues for running containers directly on bare metal rather than layering them on virtual machines. He covers the history of containers and how SmartOS runs Linux workloads via syscall emulation.

Micah Lee's Circle of HOPE 2018 talk on Qubes OS, which isolates activities in separate virtual machines so one compromise, such as a bad PDF or USB stick, does not expose everything. He gives an overview timed around the Qubes 4.0 release.

Quentin Perret of Google gives a technical deep dive into protected KVM (pKVM) on Arm64, a confidential computing approach for CPUs without hardware extensions. It explains how the nVHE hypervisor manages stage-2 MMU access control to protect guest memory.

Bryan Cantrill of Joyent describes the experience of porting KVM to SmartOS, an Illumos-based OS, at KVM Forum 2011. He covers the process, the pain points and how DTrace helped.

John Carmack's keynote at Oculus Connect 2014 about the Gear VR and development stories from building it. He discusses mobile GPU optimization, latency, and display ideas like programmable interlacing.

Pranav Mistry demos SixthSense, a wearable device that projects information onto the physical world and lets people interact with data through gestures. He also shows a paper "laptop" and says he will open-source the software.

Tom Dale explains the internals of the Glimmer VM, Ember's rendering engine, which compiles templates to opcodes. The talk includes a performance benchmark demo.

An AWS re:Invent 2018 session diving into the Nitro system, a set of hardware offload and security building blocks behind next-generation EC2 instances. It covers the design and architecture and how Nitro enables new instance types.

A Curry On talk by Lars Bak, known for V8 and Dart, on building a secure and robust IoT development platform. It discusses language and VM design choices for small devices.

Chris Urmson's SXSW 2016 talk on Google's self-driving car project, covering 1.3 million self-driven miles and the gap between hype and reality. It shows sensor visualizations and playbacks of hard situations the cars met, and discusses failures such as the low-speed bus collision.

A DEF CON 23 talk showing how weak controls in electronic death registration systems let someone virtually kill a person and obtain a real death certificate, with consequences for their identity and life.

Cliff Click of Azul Systems asks what a JVM is supposed to do, in a Google Tech Talk from 2011. He covers the services a JVM provides, such as garbage collection and compilation, and the messy reality beneath the abstractions.

Jafar Husain's ACM keynote presents Netflix's JSON Graph and Falcor, which let web developers treat all cloud data as one virtual JSON model. It combines reactive programming with REST principles.

Devine Lu Linvega of Hundred Rabbits talks about low-power, offline computing, esoteric languages and the Uxn virtual machine, informed by years of sailing the Pacific. The talk frames computing sustainability through a permaculture lens.

Jérôme Petazzoni explains how Linux containers are built from kernel features like cgroups, namespaces and SELinux. He demonstrates putting the pieces together by hand to make a container and compares runtimes and approaches like jails and zones.

Scott Galloway's TED talk uses data to argue that young Americans are financially worse off than earlier generations, calling it a great intergenerational theft. He covers root causes and what could change it.

Leptos creator Greg Johnston examines Rust/WebAssembly frontend frameworks against JavaScript frameworks using the JS framework benchmark. He argues that WASM is no longer too slow for DOM-heavy rendering.

A 1997 Noam Chomsky talk at Northeastern University about the gap between free-market rhetoric and practice. He argues that business relies heavily on state intervention, and he discusses trade, NAFTA and labour versus capital mobility.

Bryan Cantrill's Monktoberfest 2023 talk takes on AI doomerism, weighing the theoretical existential risks against the reality on the ground. He takes a skeptical but thoughtful view of how to balance AI's potential against its risks.

Charlie Miller and Chris Valasek present their DEF CON 23 talk on remotely compromising an unmodified Jeep, pivoting from the entertainment system to the vehicle's internal networks to send control messages. They aim to show the reality of car hacking.