Forum Discussion
Focusing to infinity and nearby objects
I have noticed this weird things with current Dev Kit. When looking at some textured object that is right in front of you, your eyes tend to both look at it and simultaneously focus at it. Because the Rift is focused into infinity, the texture just gets blurry. However if you keep your other eye closed and then relax the open eye to focus into infinity, then the texture gets sharp, but it looks like it's far away.
I don't know how big a problem this even is, but I suppose it isn't even fixable.
What about our eyes, do they get used to see objects very near, but focus into infinity at the same time? I'm not an eye expert, but it would be nice to hear from someone who has studied this more.
I don't know how big a problem this even is, but I suppose it isn't even fixable.
What about our eyes, do they get used to see objects very near, but focus into infinity at the same time? I'm not an eye expert, but it would be nice to hear from someone who has studied this more.
8 Replies
- You can sort of tell how far an object is from the camera centre view quite easily. Then you could change the focal distance to something else. But then you do not know where the eye is truly looking at anyway. Dunno if that'd help or be a hindrance.
- It sounds like the rift is fooling your eyes into thinking they need to focus closer for nearby objects like they do in reality. That's actually really interesting, from a psychological point of view. I'm going to assume that it is not the case for most users, since I haven't seen any other posts about it. Does it happen all the time, or just on certain objects?
Actually, I wonder if the reverse could happen. If someone spent a lot of time in the rift, could their eyes forget how to focus on a near object in real life and just stay at infinity (at least temporarily)? "grodenglaive" wrote:
It sounds like the rift is fooling your eyes into thinking they need to focus closer for nearby objects like they do in reality. That's actually really interesting, from a psychological point of view. I'm going to assume that it is not the case for most users, since I haven't seen any other posts about it. Does it happen all the time, or just on certain objects?
Actually, I wonder if the reverse could happen. If someone spent a lot of time in the rift, could their eyes forget how to focus on a near object in real life and just stay at infinity (at least temporarily)?
Yes that's the case. I think no one else has mentioned this because I too only noticed it when something was maybe just 5-10cm away from the camera. Normally with the low resolution dev kit the texture quality really doesn't matter when you're amazed by the 3D effect. But when you have a really high resolution textures and you're trying to look at them closely, you have to focus into infinity.I noticed this in Veiviev's demo, that texture quality is amazing:D"obzen" wrote:
You can sort of tell how far an object is from the camera centre view quite easily. Then you could change the focal distance to something else. But then you do not know where the eye is truly looking at anyway. Dunno if that'd help or be a hindrance.
Yeah something like eye tracking could solve something."Ananas" wrote:
I noticed this in Veiviev's demo, that texture quality is amazing:D
No wonder your eyes didn't know where to focus on... ;)"Ananas" wrote:
I think no one else has mentioned this because I too only noticed it when something was maybe just 5-10cm away from the camera.
In real life, you can't focus on an object that is 5cm away, so it's just a blurry mess. Convergence is mainly driven by sharp edges (matching them between the two eyes), so having blurry edges mean your brain quickly gives up trying to converge your eyes on the object.
But in VR, everything is sharp whatever distance it is. So now your brain does actually try to get your eyes to converge on the object, and that can actually hurt. It may be that adding an artificial blur on objects closer than about 15cm will help prevent this happening by accident in a game."ad2003" wrote:
"Ananas" wrote:
I noticed this in Veiviev's demo, that texture quality is amazing:D
No wonder your eyes didn't know where to focus on... ;)
I found that their demo seemed to have incorrect eye settings (testing for scientific reasons of course). Getting near someone's face (like less than half a metre) was painful to converge, while in my own demos that works fine. There was a setting that made it better (ICO), but I think the people looked the wrong scale then. The fact your eyes had trouble focusing doesn't surprise me.- Just wanted to mention that I played the NewRetroArcade Gameboys with my DK1 and noticed this again. I first thought it was because of my DK1's low reso but I could read the text in Gameboys only with one eye shut. Trying to focus with both eyes made everything blurry. I wonder if in the future we learn to focus into infinity even though converging to a nearby object
How's it with DK2? At least you can now lean back so that the Gameboy isn't right on your face. - DK2 actually is not focused infinity. If I'm not mistaken I believe it's focused at around 1.5m.
What you guys are probably seeing is the vergence-accommodation conflict, which probably won't be completely solved without new technology (like light-field displays).
I haven't tried the NewRetroArcade yet, so it's also possible it's some sort of software issue on their end.
