POV-Ray : Newsgroups : povray.off-topic : Rift! : Rift! Server Time
5 Jul 2024 08:33:34 EDT (-0400)
  Rift!  
From: scott
Date: 3 Sep 2015 09:39:57
Message: <55e84dad@news.povray.org>
I got an Oculus Rift DK2 yesterday :-)

https://www.oculus.com/en-us/dk2/

First impressions are WOW! Even with the poorly textured demo scene it 
immediately fools your brain that you're actually there. I didn't 
realise but even when you think you're sitting still your head is moving 
slightly, and I think it's the image moving in perfect synchronisation 
that fools your brain your most. You start to move your hands, and your 
brain is expecting to see them move, but of course they don't appear in 
the scene - it is a very strange feeling.

However I next fired up a car racing game (Live for Speed). In this game 
there is a 3D model of driver and hands on the steering wheel. They move 
in perfect sync with your own hands moving the physical wheel. It 
completely fools your brain that it's your own arms and hands you're 
looking at (even though they are low resolution polygon models with 
obvious straight edges). When you take your hand off the wheel in real 
life, and the hand in the game is still on the wheel, again it is a very 
weird feeling like something has gone wrong in your eyes or head.

I took a while to just look around the detailing of the 3D model inside 
the car, I'd never seen that before. You can even stick your head out 
the side window and look down at the road - it's a pretty crazy feeling.

But there are two big downsides IMHO. First and most importantly the 
image resolution is absolutely atrocious. I'm only used to 1680x1050 
monitors at home, but this is like going back to 320x240 days. I know 
they're using a 1920x1080 panel under the hood, but this is shared 
between two eyes and it's not used all the way to the edges. I think the 
optics also means the pixels appear bigger in the centre of the display 
than towards the edges.

The only way I can describe it is to imagine you're sat right in the 
front row in front of a huge cinema screen. Now imagine the film on the 
screen was done at a resolution of 800x600. And you're only interested 
in the action in a small spot directly ahead, so the important bit is 
probably only using 250x250 resolution or something. Your brain starts 
to filter out the pixel jaggies after a while, but the lack of detail 
(especially objects in the distance) is very bad.

The other downside is the display certainly doesn't cover your entire 
field of view. It's like wearing a full-face helmet, your peripheral 
vision is black at the edges. The focus also goes off towards the edges, 
so if you want to look at something near the edge of the screen (say the 
side-mirror of the car) you can't just move your eyes to look that way, 
you need to rotate your head round to bring that bit of the image 
towards the centre of the screen.

I'd say they need to use at least 4x the pixels (4Kx2K panel) before 
it's even matching a low-end PC monitor, let alone what people are used 
to with "retina" displays nowadays. You'd probably need 8Kx4K for that. 
Along with 16 GPUs to power it :-) That day will come though, this is 
surely just the beginning!


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