To provide a good high resolution in that area though is going to require much better screens in our VR/AR headsets than we currently have with a corresponding bump in rendering power. With VR the best resolution you can conceivably have is to fill the whole FOV with a monitor which gives you the resolution of the internal screens. This ignores problems like screen door and lens distortion that is going to reduce the usable area and worst of all who's monitor takes up the ~100 degrees of FOV a current headset gives, there's loads of stuff around so what you're used to seeing will require probably 4-8k+ per eye.
It is a tradeoff. The wider the FOV, the lower the amount of detail and the more visible screen-door effect is, assuming the same display tech.
Higher resolution displays require more computing power. And that power could be invested into more convincing graphics and lower latency.
Comfort matters too and better displays and optics can be bulkier and heavier.
The final tradeoff is, of course, price.
I know there are plans for high FOV headsets. Both cheap and expensive, so wait and see. VR tech is too early for me to invest more than a cardboard.
Very high resolution panels will be needed for Virtual Reality headsets to reach human eye level fidelity. When looking at even this LCD panel from just an inch away from your eyes and through lenses, it's actually quite a low effective resolution per eye. We still have to go A LONG way to go with respect to screen technology.
Also unfortunately this technology is LCD (not OLED), so not suitable for VR applications due to lack of low-persistance.
Personally I find current VR already at the mind-blowing level, although I agree there are some things which definitely need improvement. However for me FOV never has been an issue, I barely notice lack of peripheral vision.
The main issue I see is relatively low resolution - with normal monitors you have at least 1920x1080 covering small percentage of your view; with VR there's half of that covering whole view. Increasing FOV without providing better resolution will only make it worse.
This can be especially noticeable in games with large distances (like ETS2) and games with small text size. For those I'd definitely like to see a headset with at least 4k resolution.
Yeah that's the major issue with VR or AR monitors. If the screen fits into your whole field of view the headset screen has to be much higher resolution than the screen it's displaying.
Just because a headset has high resolution and therefore complete fov coverage and no screen door, does not mean that it has to be utilized. If someone has a weak computer they can render a lower resolution and smaller area and scale it. Every headset should be capable of high resolution because anything less than that is not compelling vr. Multiple gpus is fine.
If you want to render at 2560x1440 inside of VR and not lose quality the VR resolution has to be bigger per eye than display resolution. You would need a VR headset that has 4k per eye rather than a better GPU.
We're getting very close to high quality and inexpensive eye-tracking technology that will make it cheap and easy to implement foveated rendering in VR headsets (basically, only rendering high quality where your eye is looking in a completely unnoticeable manner). That will really drop the hardware requirements and make high field of view/high resolution headsets totally doable.
This is talking about right at the fovea though. Thats a pretty small space.
I'm thinking we will see VR sewing in the next decade, because we'll find shortcuts to making it work. Sure hyper-acuity is hard, but its virtual reality, as long as you can make it look real it may as well be.
What I mean by that is - perhaps we could use tricks like stacking high-density screens which capture different portions of the pixels. Say you've got 3 high res screens somewhere in the headset, and somehow they are routing to the eye. With optics a high resolution screen can be made even higher resolution but smaller. It still is a very difficult problem to solve for sure, but I think if there are multiple difficult problems to choose from, chances are we'll find ways to partially solve some, combine that, and have something like a solution as a result.
With 3 screens you could have full scene for one, focused region on another, and fovea on another, and then optically stack that...somehow.
But regardless, I don't think resolution is going to be what makes or breaks VR/AR. We worked with computers just fine when they were ~500 "pixels" tall, and it's not like screen resolution technology has hit a wall that it can't get past yet, things are still improving.
How close are we to being able to render a high resolution monitor / TV inside VR? Not necessarily a 4K screen, but like a good 2560 x 1440 display? How close are we to high resolution virtual cinema experience?
... or are we there? I really have no idea how resolutions in VR work.
Ever-increasing improvements aren't required; the eye has a (more or less) fixed resolution. In fact, HMDs with extremely high resolutions already exist, e.g. the Varjo VR-2 Pro and the XR-1, they just cost an arm and a leg. In a few years we'll get them at consumer-level prices instead of having to drop $6-12k.
>The high resolution needs to be only at the center of the field of vision. Outside the center, low res will do fine.
It sounds like you're describing foveated rendering[1] which requires that the headset also track where your eyes are looking, not just the direction of your head. It's a very exciting possible future direction for VR/AR but I think it's still a bit off (and likely still requires very high resolution miniaturised display for the foreseeable future)
Few months ago, I was very excited about vr. I want to invest myself in vr, develop for it, learn it.
I'm also worried about the impossible problems to solve. For me, the biggest issue is the screen door effect. it is said that only 8k per eye resolution can solve this.
I think there are still 10 more years before vr becomes small, cheap and good enough.
For VR to ever begin to approach something close to reality, and to really prevent people from getting sick wearing the headsets, it needs to be nearly 90Hz per eye and very high definition in a very small, lightweight package. While you're focused on the rectangular screens, the market is figuring out other ways to use this technology.
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