Forum Discussion
[Tips] Getting Good Sense of Depth in Stereo 3D
Hey guys,
I've been working on a design for my game and finally had the chance to see how my efforts were working in VR and I have to say I was heavily underwhelmed by its depth. There was no "Wow" factor because in the end it seemed rather flat.
With that said, I've decided this may be a good place to build a sort of repository of tips on how to achieve effective Stereo 3D environments in VR and help pave the way for other VR game designers. This could include shader ideas, placement of objects, settings - honestly whatever worked for you!
Post your findings and please provide imagery with your explanation of what worked and what didn't work. Thanks everyone and I hope this thread becomes useful. ;)
I've been working on a design for my game and finally had the chance to see how my efforts were working in VR and I have to say I was heavily underwhelmed by its depth. There was no "Wow" factor because in the end it seemed rather flat.
With that said, I've decided this may be a good place to build a sort of repository of tips on how to achieve effective Stereo 3D environments in VR and help pave the way for other VR game designers. This could include shader ideas, placement of objects, settings - honestly whatever worked for you!
Post your findings and please provide imagery with your explanation of what worked and what didn't work. Thanks everyone and I hope this thread becomes useful. ;)
7 Replies
- Hi!
good idea you had, here are two aspects that worked really well for me:
Previous experience in real life
VR Cinema 3D: because I have experienced being in a big cinema room before, and because this soft reproduces a cinema room with realistic dimensions. This seems to go a long way in tricking my brain :)
Combining objects of different scales in the scene
Titans of Space: planets and stars could look very flat when up close, but showing their relative size gives the feeling of standing in front of a massive sphere (especially for the sun, "knowing" the size of the Earth).
Note that both are very subjective (and my explanations might be confused!), but that's all I can think of right now... - Yeah, TychoBrahe stated pretty much the biggest tip I'm aware of: have stuff in the foreground to contrast against the stuff that's further away.
In a similar vein, I get a kick out of the demos that have something fly close to my head and I feel like I have to duck or get out of the way. So maybe having things move from foreground to background and from background to foreground could be another helpful effect. You know when the tunnel first shows up in Ciess? Sort of starts off feeling like another background element, and then you move into/though it. - This is actually an age old problem even before Stereo photography.
For effective depth in any scene (stereo or not) your mind needs a point of reference, something it regognises the size of. Steps are a great example and work particularly well, ladderes, stories of a building, chairs (especially wooden dinning chairs) anything which is instantly recognisable and the always the same size (which is why steps work so well).
For even better Depth especially in stereo you need objects in the foreground and in the middle distance.
You may be stereoblind and if that is the case the stereo features of the oculus will be lost on you but these tips will still help and have been use in cinema for a very very long time. - In addition to what others have said, I might recommend the old trick of decreasing the contrast for further away things, whether it's actually in the textures of objects that will always be far away, or with very subtle fog of some sort. The idea is to replicate the effect that air between you and the object has.
Here's two examples in concept art (credit to Matt Ellis):
http://www.presidiacreative.com/wp-content/uploads/2011/06/Mountain-Range.jpg
http://www.presidiacreative.com/wp-content/uploads/2011/06/dragonlair_matte.jpg
You can see that on the closer mountains, the darks are darker, the lights are lighter, and the colors are more saturated. Things just get more gray as they're farther away.
Combining that with the above suggestions may help the illusion of depth. - cool. bit silly i have to reply to 3 posts before i can Make my own. but i understand :)
- Hey, this is a great and intersting topic! I once read a great paper on the topic, however it seems you have to either pay for it or have some other form of access, probably provided by a university or college. However I did find a similar but longer and more complicated paper anyone can view. http://www.mit.edu/~jpfautz/jpfautz-thesis.pdf
If you think you can get access to it, this is the paper I am more familiar with and have read in full: http://dl.acm.org/citation.cfm?doid=1836248.1836276
Hope they help. - I worked with VR from 2000-2007 and I have worked with several engines, and games.
The best game I have ever seen in stereovision was quake3.
One aspect of quake3 that no other game has ever done before, or since, is a fixed UV to XYZ scale.
The UV texture density is the same for every object in the scene.
Typically a game will use a low resolution texture for a wall, and then use a high resolution textures on all the objects in the room. Your brain notices the texture density differences, and assumes it can use that information to judge scale. But the difference in resolution is so dramatic that the objects don't match up with each other.
If you can imagine a object with a high resolution texture in the distance will have per display pixel detail, but a object closer with a lower resolution texture will look blury, with less detail even though it is closer. Using a fixed UV to XYZ ratio means everything will fade into the distance at a constant rate. :geek:
