Forum Discussion
Software support for rift...
I posted this topic on the oculus reddit page but it didnt get the response i wanted. I wanted to know what people that have used the rift think of using the rift in 2d. i have heard a few videos ment...
Directly displaying 2d information would be a real hassle.
I can see this working (assuming resolution issues such as text legibility and the like don't get in the way) if you were to create a 3d environment, and then map the 2d display information onto a surface.
The end result would be like sitting near an actual monitor, which is floating in virtual space. (or appears to be an actual, physical monitor, depending on the environment you map it into.)
Because you'd potentially be able to move your head, you could simulate the effects of having an extremely large monitor, or even a curved one that wraps around your field of view.
Given the resolution limitations though, you'd probably have to simulate a rather large monitor for any of it to be usable in any sense.
The current headset has an effective resolution of just 640 by 800. That may not sound so bad, given that I'm typing this on a 1280 by 800 display, but this display occupies maybe 30 degrees of my horizontal and vertical field of view.
A rough calculation, even without all the optical distortion in the rift headset shows you the problem a little better:
Assuming 30 degrees in each plane for my display (probably not entirely accurate, but reasonable enough as an approximation), the horizontal resolution is about 42 pixels / degree (1280 / 30), and the vertical resolution is about 26 pixels / degree (800 / 30)
The occulus rift is claimed to have a horizontal field of view of about 90 degrees, and a vertical field of view of about 110 degrees. that makes the horizontal resolution about 7 pixels / degree (640 / 90), and the vertical resolution also roughly 7 pixels / degree (800 / 110).
The estimate for how much of my field of view my monitor takes up is very imprecise, but it still shows that at a best, case, the rift is about 1/4 the resolution per degree of vision.
To put that in perspective, mimicking my monitor's physical size and distance in virtual reality, it's apparent screen resolution is 320 by 200...
The kind of resolution I haven't seen since the days of DOS. Even windows 3.11 typically ran at 640 by 480 or more.
Put differently, to roughly mimic the readability of my display, you would need it to occupy about 4 times as much area as it actually does, and simulate it at the same distance. (That would mean it occupies about 120 degrees of my field of view.)
It's a 15.4 inch laptop display, and I'm about 50 cm away from it (about 1.5 feet).
So imagine sitting 1.5 foot away from a 60 inch screen with a total resolution of 1280 by 800, and you'll get some idea of what this would be like.
Keep in mind, with a display that large, that close to your face, you wouldn't be able to see the whole thing in one go.
It's not impossible of course, but it's not hugely practical.
(You could perhaps simulate the equivalent of several 30 inch displays reasonably well, if you were willing to accept them being 640 by 480 displays or something similar... - Keep in mind that no version of windows since windows 98 functions comfortably at resolutions this low, but it could work in a pinch, I guess.)
Displaying movies might work better, because low resolutions aren't usually a critical issue there. (I counted the pixels on my old CRT PAL tv, and it came to 480 by 480, which is even still good enough to have readable subtitles. - it's not HD by any stretch of the imagination, but it's a lot more practical than general desktop use.)
In case you're wondering, we can work this out backwards as well, to see how much things would have to improve to make this practical.
Let's say you want to replicate the effect of a reasonable size monitor (say, 24 inches or so).
At typical viewing distances, that would probably have a field of view of about 40-50 degrees.
The minimum reasonable resolution modern operating systems will be more or less usable at without major issues is 1024 by 768. (an equivalent widescreen resolution would work too I guess.)
Assuming nothing else of note about the rift design then you'd be looking at about the following;
let's say the display has a horizontal field of view of 50 degrees. It would then have about 20 pixels / degree.
Since the current dev kit model is about 7 pixels per degree, you can see it would need to have about triple it's current resolution.
That means, for this to be reasonably practical in a realistic sense, we'd have to get the rift's resolution up to about 3840 by 2400...
I don't know about you, but I don't recall many displays with resolutions like that right now... It'll happen eventually, especially on larger displays, because of the push toward 4k and 8k tv, but still...
I hope that gives you some sense of what you're up against with this.
I know I'm one of the people crazy enough to try and implement something like this. But I won't pretend it's practical for the foreseeable future.
I can see this working (assuming resolution issues such as text legibility and the like don't get in the way) if you were to create a 3d environment, and then map the 2d display information onto a surface.
The end result would be like sitting near an actual monitor, which is floating in virtual space. (or appears to be an actual, physical monitor, depending on the environment you map it into.)
Because you'd potentially be able to move your head, you could simulate the effects of having an extremely large monitor, or even a curved one that wraps around your field of view.
Given the resolution limitations though, you'd probably have to simulate a rather large monitor for any of it to be usable in any sense.
The current headset has an effective resolution of just 640 by 800. That may not sound so bad, given that I'm typing this on a 1280 by 800 display, but this display occupies maybe 30 degrees of my horizontal and vertical field of view.
A rough calculation, even without all the optical distortion in the rift headset shows you the problem a little better:
Assuming 30 degrees in each plane for my display (probably not entirely accurate, but reasonable enough as an approximation), the horizontal resolution is about 42 pixels / degree (1280 / 30), and the vertical resolution is about 26 pixels / degree (800 / 30)
The occulus rift is claimed to have a horizontal field of view of about 90 degrees, and a vertical field of view of about 110 degrees. that makes the horizontal resolution about 7 pixels / degree (640 / 90), and the vertical resolution also roughly 7 pixels / degree (800 / 110).
The estimate for how much of my field of view my monitor takes up is very imprecise, but it still shows that at a best, case, the rift is about 1/4 the resolution per degree of vision.
To put that in perspective, mimicking my monitor's physical size and distance in virtual reality, it's apparent screen resolution is 320 by 200...
The kind of resolution I haven't seen since the days of DOS. Even windows 3.11 typically ran at 640 by 480 or more.
Put differently, to roughly mimic the readability of my display, you would need it to occupy about 4 times as much area as it actually does, and simulate it at the same distance. (That would mean it occupies about 120 degrees of my field of view.)
It's a 15.4 inch laptop display, and I'm about 50 cm away from it (about 1.5 feet).
So imagine sitting 1.5 foot away from a 60 inch screen with a total resolution of 1280 by 800, and you'll get some idea of what this would be like.
Keep in mind, with a display that large, that close to your face, you wouldn't be able to see the whole thing in one go.
It's not impossible of course, but it's not hugely practical.
(You could perhaps simulate the equivalent of several 30 inch displays reasonably well, if you were willing to accept them being 640 by 480 displays or something similar... - Keep in mind that no version of windows since windows 98 functions comfortably at resolutions this low, but it could work in a pinch, I guess.)
Displaying movies might work better, because low resolutions aren't usually a critical issue there. (I counted the pixels on my old CRT PAL tv, and it came to 480 by 480, which is even still good enough to have readable subtitles. - it's not HD by any stretch of the imagination, but it's a lot more practical than general desktop use.)
In case you're wondering, we can work this out backwards as well, to see how much things would have to improve to make this practical.
Let's say you want to replicate the effect of a reasonable size monitor (say, 24 inches or so).
At typical viewing distances, that would probably have a field of view of about 40-50 degrees.
The minimum reasonable resolution modern operating systems will be more or less usable at without major issues is 1024 by 768. (an equivalent widescreen resolution would work too I guess.)
Assuming nothing else of note about the rift design then you'd be looking at about the following;
let's say the display has a horizontal field of view of 50 degrees. It would then have about 20 pixels / degree.
Since the current dev kit model is about 7 pixels per degree, you can see it would need to have about triple it's current resolution.
That means, for this to be reasonably practical in a realistic sense, we'd have to get the rift's resolution up to about 3840 by 2400...
I don't know about you, but I don't recall many displays with resolutions like that right now... It'll happen eventually, especially on larger displays, because of the push toward 4k and 8k tv, but still...
I hope that gives you some sense of what you're up against with this.
I know I'm one of the people crazy enough to try and implement something like this. But I won't pretend it's practical for the foreseeable future.