VR seems great for folks, but you're putting your eyes' ciliary muscles into a cast and then working the rest of you out. Few activities put your eyes at a fixed 1.3m focal distance for the entire time.
Human vision cannot focus on an object less than 9” away without fatigue. VR headsets put lenses between your eyes and the screen to give up to several feet of effective focal distance.
My optometrist is very enthusiastic about VR - apparently the way focusing works in VR puts a lot less strain on your eye muscles than staring at a screen.
So we’re continually estimating range using the tensions in two sets of muscles - one for focus, the other for convergence. When the brain gets the right signals, these two mechanisms agree perfectly.
Just got my HTC Vive. Nausea isn't a problem for me, but age has definitely made me farsighted. Muscles in my eye might strain to let me focus close, but that's just not happening nowadays. Since this has happened gradually over the years, my brain has gotten used to it.
Oddly enough, when I tried the Oculus Rift, I found I could focus more clearly on nearby virtual objects than far away ones. Not only is VR an alternate reality where I can play with force fields and laser beams, it's a reality where my eyes aren't old anymore and work correctly.
One thing that worries me about wearing VR headsets for extended periods of time (whether for game or for work) is that your eyes are focusing at a single distance for so long. Not sure if there is any research to suggest extended usage is a problem, but it 'feels' like it could be. At least with a desktop or laptop, when you look around the room, you are actually changing your focal length.
this represent a persistent and common misunderstanding of how VR optics works. VR is good for your eyes because the focal point is actually quite far away. Hence why you still need corrective lenses to use it if you are short sighted. It's a lot better than staring at a close up screen.
> Your eyes focus "into" the VR scene, not at the screens one inch from your eye.
3D head gear like Oculus have optical systems that move the physical screens virtually to a much greater (and comfortable) distance - most people can't even focus objects closer than about 10 cm.
That's not what I meant. Rather, even that virtual 3D screen is still at a fixed apparent distance from your eyes, unlike a natural scene that contains objects that are father or closer. Such objects scatter light not only at different angles for the two eyes, the bulk of the 3D effect, but also at different internal convergence, requiring the eye's lens to deform and compensate.
This is an effect current tech cannot reproduce, leading to a nauseating and tiring viewing experience - as if the whole immersive virtual world wasn't already.
One nice thing is that (next to being able to dim the screen as there is no background), the eyes actually focus on infinity with the lenses in a VR headset. This is the eye's natural state (staring in the distance, relaxed circular muscles around the lenses, which then flatten), and should be much better in the long term that staring at a screen 50 cm away from you.
HMD's are a pretty good solution to VR, but there are still a number of unsolved problems which can't be addressed by higher pixel density, faster refresh, and more powerful GPUs.
For instance, how do you account for the focal adjustments your eye makes when you look at objects at different distances in a virtual scene when you are staring at a screen only a short distance from your face?
I'm more interested in how it affects your eye focus. With regular VR it's hard to focus your eyes right when bringing objects closer to you. It takes some getting used to.
I'm largely an ignoramus about how eyeballs function. But this sounds... suspicious. When a screen is inches away from your eyeball, isn't your eye focusing on that? I'd expect a VR headset to cause more eye strain than almost any alternative. Am I misunderstanding something?
My VR headset is 1400p per eye and GARBAGE for looking at text on a virtual screen. Any display tech that expects you to focus at a virtual plane for long periods of time will really hurt your eyes, and be basically unusable for many people. If you struggle in nice 3D movies to feel like your eyes are comfortable, you will have that same feeling in a VR or AR glasses situation.
Basically, any system that requires your eyes to focus on a physical screen that isn't the same distance as virtual objects will piss off your brain, because it knows something is going on, and hates being tricked without consent. Some people I think can ignore this effect to some extent, others cannot. It also strains your eyes more than focusing on an actual 2D screen so increases eye fatigue compared.
Your brain puts together multiple 3-d cues. If you are looking directly at something the angle of your two eyeballs is a little different dependening on the distance and this is vergence.
Your eyes also focus like the autofocus of a camera and the cue from that is called accommodation.
The two should match to provide perfect perception on reality. Certainly a VR headset works with a fixed focus for everything, but to get the ultimate perception of reality without eye strain a VR headset should be able to simulate focusing distance.
(Who knows, however? Meta’s Super Bowl ad might be revealing their real intentions. In that ad a discarded animatronic Android gets to relive its past with VR. VR is good for the elderly because you can enjoy it without learning anything new. I think one of the worst things about getting old that I experience is presbyopia where you can’t focus over the whole range so you have to wear two pairs of glasses. Maybe I’d find it easier just to have it all in focus all the time.)
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