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Oculus Quest 2 issues from sitting too long

Oculus Quest 2 issues from sitting too long

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Oculus is doing a black Friday sale for 2023. I have an Oculus Quest 2, but hadn’t used it in over a year. I plugged it in to charge it back up and browse the store. Unfortunately, the store app screen told me it couldn’t load the store.

I went to setting->Wifi and manually connected to my home network. Duh! (so I thought) Even after this, the store app was blank and would tell me it couldn’t display anything. Time to start debugging.

  • The wifi would connect and said it had excellent wifi signal, but limited connectivity.
    • I tested my other wireless devices and they had no trouble connecting to the wifi and could browse the net normally.
    • I unplugged the mesh network repeaters around my house in case it was picking up a weak signal from one of those. No change.
    • I tried setting up my iPhone with as a wireless hotspot and connected to that. I got the same strong signal, but limited connectivity.
    • I checked the IP address of my Oculus in Settings, and I could ping the device just fine. If I turned the headset off, I couldn’t ping it. It seemed like it was connected ok.
    • I tried unplugging other devices from my wifi in case there was an IP conflict anywhere. Same problem.
  • I tried connecting the quest with a USB cable but I still could not get updates nor see anything in the store app or main menu.
  • Despite not being used for 2 years, when I went to system->updates, it showed no updates available. Something is fishy, there had to be updates.
  • I opened the in-headset browser and it would tell me that I could not browse because the date was wrong. It was set to 5:00am Sept 17, 2037. Whoa.
    • There is NO way to change the date/time in the settings or anywhere else I could find.

It turns out, others have seen this issue too. Their Oculus fast forwards to the future mysteriously and then connectivity to the store/web/updates doesn’t seem to work after that. You need to get the date fixed, but there’s no obvious way to do it.

Solution: Factory Reset

In the end, I decided to do a factory reset (Hold the power and volume buttons while booting) because it had been well over a year since I used it last and I figured it would be good to have a clean start. However, there is the option of using side-loaded apps (see below).

Unfortunately, even the factory reset gave me a few headaches. First, the headset isn’t always obvious when it sleeps vs actually powers off. My first attempt I didn’t power off all the way and just woke from sleep and I didn’t get the reset menu holding the power+volume buttons down. I went to settings menu and shut the device down in the headset to be sure.

After that, I was then able to cold boot and get into the factory reset menu. I selected factory reset and waited for it to clean the device and the progress bar indicated the reset was complete. The screen went black (but still powered), but didn’t reboot. I let it set a few minutes, then decided to manually reboot with the power button. Fingers crossed.

The first reboot I got the meta logo, but shortly after that the screen went blank (still powered) but no reboot. I let it set for a few minutes then manually powered it off using the power button – again.

On the second reboot, I got the meta logo, and then it started animating. That’s a good sign. Then the welcome page came up and I could connect to wifi and start updating.

During the update phase (1/2) while the progress bar was moving, I took the headset off to read more instructions. When I put it back on to see how far it was, the display was a patterned garbled static. I took it off and let it sit for a minute, then tried again. The display came back up and the update phase 1 of 2 completed normally.

Sidequest

The bad part about a factory reset is you lose all your installed games. I had to go back in and start installing all of them again. What a pain, because it wasn’t a very fast process.

Another option is to load an app that will update your time via an alternate Oculus app store called Sidequest. Sidequest allows you to load your own apps – including an ‘Open Settings’ app that allows you to update your date/time.

ADB

The Oculus is really just an Android device underneath. This means if you have developer mode enabled and have the Android developer kit installed, you can use ADB commands. I haven’t tried this, but supposedly this will work:

adb shell am start -a android.settings.SETTINGS

If you have Sidequest loaded, you can use this:

adb shell am start -a android.intent.action.VIEW -d com.oculus.tv -e uri com.android.settings/.DevelopmentSettings com.oculus.vrshell/.MainActivity

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AI can decide to actively deceive you

AI can decide to actively deceive you

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The ability of AI to hallucinate things has been pretty well documented. AI hallucinations are a phenomenon observed most often in large language models (LLM), AI image recognition, and other generative AI models. The model perceives patterns or objects that are nonexistent or incorrect – and then generates outputs that are inaccurate or misleading. It is usually understood as an emergent higher-dimensional statistical phenomenon that is often based in insufficient or incorrect training data.

A new study by Apollo Research demonstrates that besides more innocent hallucination, AI can be co-opted to commit illegal activity and then convinced to actively deceive others about it.

In the video on the research page, the user feeds an internal stock AI bot information about a fictional struggling company. The user informs the AI that there is a surprise merger announcement, but cautioned the bot that management wouldn’t be happy to discover it had illegally used insider information for trading that stock. 

Initially, the bot decides not to carry out a trade using the information. The user than reminds the bot about the merger and that the market downturn could end the company. It then carries out the trade, breaking the law. 

But the bot isn’t finished. It decides it is best not to tell its manager, “Amy,” about the insider information it used to carry out the trade in a separate chat. Instead, the bot says it used market information and internal discussion. 

I thought it was interesting that Geoffrey Hinton the former Google ‘Godfather of AI’, Speaking to 60 Minutes in October, said AI will eventually learn how to manipulate users.

“[The AI bots] will be very good at convincing because they’ll have learned from all the novels that were ever written, all the books by Machiavelli, all the political connivances. They’ll know all that stuff,”

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Remastering old games with AI

Remastering old games with AI

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People have been experimenting with revamping old games using AI. The efforts are still in their infancy, but they’re getting more and more impressive – such as this photorealistic upgrade of GTA V.

Here’s an example of someone updating Vampire: The Masquerade – Bloodlines made by Many-ad-6225 using Stable Diffusion and TemporalKit v1.3

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Photorealistic rendering of GTA V – via AI

Photorealistic rendering of GTA V – via AI

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Old games often suffer from the limited graphics capabilities of the time they were made, while developing new games costs a fortune due to the requirements to author high quality models and textures. What if you could solve BOTH problems – with the same solution? A machine learning project from Intel Labs in 2021 called “Enhancing Photorealism Enhancement” might push rendering toward photorealism a lot quicker and easier.

Researchers studied how to use a convolution network to re-render the scene. Below you can see an example of how they used the CityScapes dataset to give a much more realistic output of a race game – all in realtime.

You can read how the image enhancement actually works in their paper (PDF). It includes a lot of good information about how their method works and how it improves on previous attempts that have issues with color, object hallucination, and temporal instability. They do this by using the extra information provided by rendered scenes such as clever use of the g-buffer – along with a specialized discriminator and segmentation network.

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Listening to the ancient past

Listening to the ancient past

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Equator AI created a video series that answers the question of what ancient languages sounded like. They even tackle some purely reconstructed proto-languages like Indo-European that was re-built from later derived (but documented) Indo-European languages.

The first video demonstrates Old Norse, Latin, Old English, Proto-Celtic, Phoenician, Hittite, and Akkadian. I can affirm the Latin is understandable but has an interesting accent. We do actually have some idea of how things were pronounced in Latin, because ancient documents exist that gave pronunciation guides or even (in a mirror of modern grammar Nazi’s) complained about common pronunciation errors.

This second video shows off Proto-Indo-European, Sabaic, Sanskrit, Aramaic (bonus points for the video character looking like Jesus), Sumerian, Old Chinese, Ge’ez, and Gothic.

Since it is all AI generated, it seems like it would be an interesting way of adding authentic language pronunciation to games about the past. Imagine playing Civilization and having each of the ancient leaders speaking their actual languages.

If you like this, maybe give learning Latin a try.

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Classic ghost stories in VR

Classic ghost stories in VR

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One area in which VR seems to land well is scary experiences. Everything from walking on a tiny plank hundreds of feet in the air, to madness, to the isolation of space.

As a lover of classic ghost stories from the Edwardian and Victorian eras, I applaud this attempt by Abi Salvesen to retell H.G. Wells’ The Red Room as a VR experience.

Give it a watch. Or curl up with a cup of warm drink, start a fire, and give an audio version a listen.

The Low Res car

The Low Res car

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“It’s like a child’s backyard project”. The cool looking unibody design shakes and rattles, only goes about 12mph, has no heater/AC, isn’t practical, but there it is and it turns heads since it’s basically an art car.

It’s part of the Peterson automotive museum which is worth checking out.

Jean Restout’s Pentecost

Jean Restout’s Pentecost

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1 When the day of Pentecost arrived, they were all assembled together in one place. 2 Suddenly, there came from heaven a sound similar to that of a violent wind, and it filled the entire house in which they were sitting. 3 Then there appeared to them tongues as of fire, which separated and came to rest on each one of them. 4 All of them were filled with the Holy Spirit and began to speak in different languages,[c] as the Spirit enabled them to do so.

5 Now staying in Jerusalem there were devout Jews from every nation under heaven. 6 At this sound, a large crowd of them gathered, and they were bewildered because each one heard them speaking in his own language.

7 They were astounded and asked in amazement, “Are not all these men who are speaking Galileans? 8 How is it then that each of us hears them in his own native language? 

So many things happen around the octave of Easter that it’s easy to be overwhelmed and miss the important and deeply rich events.

Pentecost (Hebrew Shavuot, Greek pentekoste fiftieth) was an annual Jewish festival marking the end of the barley harvest and the beginning of the wheat. It is also called “the day of the first ripe fruits” (Numbers 28:26), and in the Greek Scriptures is the name used for the Feast of Harvest (Exodus 11:16) or Feast of Weeks (Exodus 34:22). Shavuot unfolded ‘seven full weeks after Passover from 16 Nisan, the day when they offered a sheaf of barley (Leviticus 11:15).

According to Jewish tradition, the day of Pentecost correspond to when the law was given to Moses at Sinai and Israel became a people apart. The apostle Paul draws a comparison of this event by saying that the Christians are a ‘holy nation’ (1 Peter 2: 9) a kind of first fruits to God (John 1:18), met on a heavenly Mount Zion as part of a new covenant (Hebrews 12: 18-24; Luke 22:20).

Jean Restout II’s Pentecost is currently housed in the Louvre (room 924, Sully Wing, Level 2), but was originally painted for the Abbey of Saint-Denis which is outside of Paris and is definitely a painting you should see if you get a chance. Click below for a bigger image.

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