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matskatsaba
Participant
April 12, 2015

screen alignment in CV1

Recently bumped into a video about the HTC Vive.
The thing I found strange, was that the protos they were showing had two displays but in portrait mode.
The thing I don't really understand is, why adding height to the FOV instead of width?
With two separata display units, the display surface for each eye doesn't have to align, but can be set up in a 140 degree angle and introducing more complex lens, the field of view and so the presence might increase dramatically.

I wonder which way the oculus team is heading so I thought I ask.
Until I saw that Vive video, it never crossed my mind that the two displays would be standing in any VR headset ever.
I mean even sunglasses lenses are wider than high, to cover field of view optimally.

    4 replies

    KydDynoMyte
    Up and Coming
    April 12, 2015
    "PalmerTech" wrote:

    Having a very tall vertical field of view helps you feel grounded, so you don't have nearly as much of a compulsion to keep looking down at the ground.


    I think a closer to square/circular ratio is more natural. I also think they weren't using the full display on those dual portrait display prototypes.
    matskatsabaAuthor
    Participant
    April 12, 2015
    Natural would be a close to perfect cover which is very very far away from square or circle, but the taller-than-wide image is even further.

    Making displays stand just to ignore 30-40% of the pixels on it feels a bit waste: even a landscape lcd is on market with the exact same vertical pixel height as the rumored CV resolution.

    Now even if the galaxy note 3's display can output the 1,4k pixel height in landscape mode.
    What's the point in using a portrait alignment when the exact same height of the displayed picture could be achieved with using landscape alignment, which also could dramatically improve FOV?

    This "taller fov" sounds so PR.
    Adding more unused pixels will likely help nothing.
    Also, "feeling grounded" is more important in real life: if you don't see what's in front of you, you may trip and fall in random objects or road errors, that's not really an issue in gaming. Still I have yet to see glasses with lenses of the shape of an upside down egg.

    I originally thought the first reply would be something like "to avoid windows problems with the screen orientation mishaps since it would be troublesome to ask samsung for a not-in-manufacture display that aligns and treats itself with the same alignment (see the dk2 "issues" ).

    I can imagine the real reason behind this could be, that oculus does not want to angle the two displays, neither the realistic and wider FOV for one simple reason: landscape displays would be too wide and so would have to be aligned in angle to keep VR HMD size rational, and that would make it mandantory to go with superconcave extreme complex lenses or lens system, so in other words, to keep costs down (which is reasonable but then why this taller FOV bs?).

    Let me ask the question again:

    Is oculus planning the CV in a way, that the rendered picture per eye will be wider than tall, as common sense dictates?
    Or going with the telescope=fashion with same height as width because "having a very tall vertical field" sounds so good that nobody realizes the used pixels are in a round-ish area not oval-ish?

    Is the VR scene willingly ignoring peripherial view in general?
    jojon
    Participant
    April 13, 2015
    In answer to the implicit side question that seems to be in there; Supposedly the reason why Valve's earlier prototypes had those tall, off-the-shelf, displays hanging down in front of your face, was so that they could increase the frame rate, by cutting the screen refresh short, partway down its scan, and force restart it ahead of time -- the bottommost part of the screen was unused.
    matskatsabaAuthor
    Participant
    April 13, 2015
    Yeah, that explains some things, thanks.
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