Screen coverage - why isn't it maximized?

My best guess is the fact that the screen isn't curved. It's extremely difficult to have a flat surface cover your entire peripheral vision. Take a piece of paper for example, the paper doesn't cover your peripheral no matter how large the paper is until you begin to curve it around your head. This is the best answer I can give you on this subject. But if Oculus VR decides to take a look into those small curved screens that are beginning to show up in the CES shows, it might be a better venture than sticking with traditional flat screens.

First off, you should only run the Rift in it's native resolution, or with precisely the same aspect ratio, which is 16:10.

Under this condition, you can never see the edges of the panel, even if you put A cups against your eyeballs. Your whole experiment is invalid and your impression is heavily biased.

For Vorpx specifically, it uses just the same rendering post-processing as regular Rift apps, and it overlays the circle texture on top, that literally serves no purpose.

That's to do with physical screen and lens size. Not the issue.

What I'm talking about is the image rendered to the display, which undercuts that. In many demos, devs only seems to use about 80% of the panel, which undermines the FOV of the Rift.

This image maximizes the real estate of the Rift screen:


This image, like many demos I've seen at native Rift resolution, does not:


The top image yields a much greater sense of immersion when viewed through the Rift, because the image is border to border and my view is limited only by the lenses of the Rift. The bottom image makes me feel like I'm viewing the world through a small pair of tubes because the black borders are distinctly present in my vision. I'm surprised to see few developers taking this into account.

So then that has to do with the developer's choice in that respect. But I still think curved screens should be implemented with the hardware :lol:

But I still think curved screens should be implemented with the hardware

Oh absolutely, I agree 100%. Slightly different topic, but yes. OLED can be shaped - therefore it would make sense to shape two panels to the curvature of each eye, presumably consuming much more of your left/right vision. However, I'm not sure if concave lenses like the ones in the Rift would work with curved displays. I get the feeling that, because they're designed to "bend" the image around your vision, that the effect would be double if not more with a concave display. As we know, the lenses are needed for focus, so I'm not sure how you'd combat that.

I'm just questioning why it seems a lot of developers aren't rendering to the full extent of the Rift panel because that does in fact undermine one of the major initiatives of the project. Even Valve's Half-Life 2 for Rift doesn't use the whole panel. The images are actually taller than they are wider, with unused space on the sides, which I find is the opposite of what's necessary because the Rift limits my horizontal FOV my much more than vertically.

Remember that the 7" screen in the DK is not what was used in the prototype from when the Kickstarter began, but something that OVR scrambled to source, after the previous, smaller, panel went out of production.

After dropping in the replacement display, I'd guess there was a good bit of weighing aspects of fidelity against availability and cost, in the choosing of the lenses to use -- You could drop in larger lenses and/or rebalance focal depth, to reach more of the screen, with various gains and tradeoffs (e.g: if you were to make the projection box deeper, you would see a larger area of the screen and thus gain resolution, but consequently suffer more clipping where the left and right images overlap).

They way to go its not curved oled screen, that would be too complex and expensive nowaydays or in near future, and the lenses would need to be fresnel lenses (with all the incovinients), the solution its 2 screens bended at an angle, like the infiniteye, you could use regular lenses and still have a much greater fov and resolution, the reason this is not implemented its it would add much to the cost, that cost that they try to shirnk pennie by pennie.

To answer the original question, I believe you generally see the smaller images in Unity games because there is no out-of-the-box supersampling going on. That small image you see was originally an image that filled the entire half-screen before it was warped for lens correction. In UDK and other engines where you see the larger warped images "fitting" to the screen itself, there was probably supersampling in place (rendered at a size much larger than the screen itself) and/or things being rendered at a FOV that is higher than is appropriate for the hardware.

You might be interested to look at this thread that discusses a possible solution for this in Unity. It appears that with a couple of code tweaks the warped images can be made to fit the screen, but at the cost of seeing larger distorted pixels as a result of the lens correction. I believe some have commented that Unity demos look sharper/crisper despite the smaller warped images. There is a "camera scaler" solution also mentioned in that thread that could address that, but both of those solutions are currently unsupported by Oculus, because I have to believe that they are working on an update to the SDK that incorporates all of this in a much cleaner and more efficient way that will be future proof for the next wave of hardware.

the solution its 2 screens bended at an angle, like the infiniteye, you could use regular lenses and still have a much greater fov and resolution, the reason this is not implemented its it would add much to the cost

If we're talking about widening the FOV outwards, this does seem like a possible solution.

I hope Oculus isn't serious about charging $300 for the final verion. If the the Rift is to reach the potential we're all envisioning, I think $300 is a dangerously tight bottleneck. What would you pay in all honesty for a perfected Rift? 3k OLED screen, no latency, no motion blur, 100% peripheral vision... you have to admit, $300 feels very low and I'm concerned Oculus might be aiming for that at the detriment of the outcome. Honestly, the potential here is too great.

I believe you generally see the smaller images in Unity games because there is no out-of-the-box supersampling going on.

That makes a lot of sense, I actually hadn't thought of that. Thanks for the thread link. I presumed the image was an in-world camera/lens shader and not an after-render warp. Wouldn't the former make more sense? Or would the performance hit be too great?

Below is the Oculus calibration scene. Notice the excellent use of screen space. I can barely, if at all, make out the borders beyond the A lenses of the Rift.



Below is the very beautiful RedFrame demo. The borders are much further in, and they're clearly within my FOV when using the Rift. It gives me the sensation of looking through a window and I keep wanting to climb through it.



Below is Half-Life 2 using the native Rift support from Valve. Again, same restrictive borders, same feeling of "I need to climb in further but I can't."

Okay, now I see what do you mean.

That depends solely on target framework Rift support implementation. HL2 has it pretty sub-par in all aspects, honestly.

As for Unity demos, there's actually a "supersample" variable in the SDK, you can put it to larger value and it'll render the scene in higher resolution, but it isn't available from the inspector window, which is why, I assume, it's never used.