Forum Discussion
Calculating the Infinite Focal Plane ("skydome")
Forgive me if this has already been solved, but I spent quite a bit of time trying to hunt down information, and ended up running some tests of my own (sans my Rift Devkit as yet). While I'm sure they...
Turning pedant mode on for a bit (and this really is a very minor point). Instead of this:
...I'd instead say that an object 745m away is indistinguishable from something at infinity. Since the number of things actually at 745m away is fairly limited, I think the right thing is to say the brain assumes everything there or beyond are all at infinity.
In practice, beyond a moderate distance the brain stops using eye vergence to determine depth and instead falls back to parallax. So you move your head sideways and the relative motions of objects tells you the depth. You can easily move your head a lot more than the vergence baseline of 64mm, so this technique is useful at massive distances - it is fairly simple to tell the difference between an object at 1000m and one beyond it. Ideally most Rift games should at least use the "head-on-a-stick" neck model, which gives the player a significant amount of parallax.
So, according to my calculations, the starry sky appears to be 744.85 meters away for anyone who has perfect visual acuity.
...I'd instead say that an object 745m away is indistinguishable from something at infinity. Since the number of things actually at 745m away is fairly limited, I think the right thing is to say the brain assumes everything there or beyond are all at infinity.
In practice, beyond a moderate distance the brain stops using eye vergence to determine depth and instead falls back to parallax. So you move your head sideways and the relative motions of objects tells you the depth. You can easily move your head a lot more than the vergence baseline of 64mm, so this technique is useful at massive distances - it is fairly simple to tell the difference between an object at 1000m and one beyond it. Ideally most Rift games should at least use the "head-on-a-stick" neck model, which gives the player a significant amount of parallax.