Not OP, but I’m going to have to wait until we get depth of field going in a headset, which is still a ways out. There are some desktop units for commercial sale to optimists, but that’s it. With the current VR headsets, having the focal distance never change just doesn’t work well for me.
If you want depth of field then that’s doable with eye tracking with foveated rendering which in addition tracks your eyes’ focal point with active global lens adjustment
Because the only practical alternative is light field displays, which are NOT trivial. We’re talking stacks of prism arrays and stacks of transparent displays or multi-laser projection + stacks of waveguides, etc
Yeah, I was referencing light field displays. I think we’ll eventually see an attempt at a commercial VR unit with light field displays, but I think it’s about a decade away before the first one goes on sale. They also have the added difficultly of needing even more renders from the GPU.
The lense adjustment would still mean that objects at different distances would still all be at the same focal plane, but that the focal plane would change depending on what you’re looking at. I bet it’s probably good enough for most people, but I’ve never heard of it before so I’ll look into it.
Quest is good and cheap. You can Sideload apps, run Steam VR and never touch a Meta app.
Doing this actually hurts Meta because it’s assumed Meta underprices the hardware and makes up the difference in software like other consoles. It’s win-win.
Yeah, but depending on where you live you can get some dirt cheap kit on the used market. Depending on who you know you probably could even get a headset gifted. I for sure tried to just give away my Rift S to friends.
Sure, its not the newest shiny thing. But is your PC even powerful enough for these?
I constantly see people in VR communities which are happy because they sniped a headset for 40 - 100 bucks. Which today is like premium controller money or depending on the game not even the price of a premium edition.
Best part is if you invest now for the first time you have tons of games of the last 10 years to play. VR still has a content issue. But not if you get that kind of backlog at once. Well, minus a few great games which were lost in time.
drmanhattanonmars.png
it’s 1995, I can’t afford a virtual boy, but the tech is just around the corner
it’s 2012, I can’t afford the Oculus Rift, but the tech is just around the corner
it’s 2026, I can’t afford the Frame, but the tech is just around the corner.
I mean the tech is here unless you’re looking for full holosuite.
Not OP, but I’m going to have to wait until we get depth of field going in a headset, which is still a ways out. There are some desktop units for commercial sale to optimists, but that’s it. With the current VR headsets, having the focal distance never change just doesn’t work well for me.
If you want depth of field then that’s doable with eye tracking with foveated rendering which in addition tracks your eyes’ focal point with active global lens adjustment
Because the only practical alternative is light field displays, which are NOT trivial. We’re talking stacks of prism arrays and stacks of transparent displays or multi-laser projection + stacks of waveguides, etc
Yeah, I was referencing light field displays. I think we’ll eventually see an attempt at a commercial VR unit with light field displays, but I think it’s about a decade away before the first one goes on sale. They also have the added difficultly of needing even more renders from the GPU.
The lense adjustment would still mean that objects at different distances would still all be at the same focal plane, but that the focal plane would change depending on what you’re looking at. I bet it’s probably good enough for most people, but I’ve never heard of it before so I’ll look into it.
If you want reference for the current state of the art in image quality, the Apple Vision Pro “eye window” display is a light field display.
So to do better you need to outspend Apple, by a lot
Wait… What? The focal distance is the difference in image between the two lensesscreens just like irl via the mkI eyeball…
You’re thinking of parallax, focal distance is about adjusting the curvature of a lens (or your eye) so that objects at that distance appear sharp
Quest is good and cheap. You can Sideload apps, run Steam VR and never touch a Meta app.
Doing this actually hurts Meta because it’s assumed Meta underprices the hardware and makes up the difference in software like other consoles. It’s win-win.
But you have to touch and be reliant on a meta os.
Yeah, but depending on where you live you can get some dirt cheap kit on the used market. Depending on who you know you probably could even get a headset gifted. I for sure tried to just give away my Rift S to friends.
Sure, its not the newest shiny thing. But is your PC even powerful enough for these?
I constantly see people in VR communities which are happy because they sniped a headset for 40 - 100 bucks. Which today is like premium controller money or depending on the game not even the price of a premium edition.
Best part is if you invest now for the first time you have tons of games of the last 10 years to play. VR still has a content issue. But not if you get that kind of backlog at once. Well, minus a few great games which were lost in time.