The Next Major Step for Oculus VR: Peripheral Vision Display

No, not really. Read Michael Abrash's presentation from Steam Dev Days. He talks a lot about presence: the sense of actually being there. The baseline FOV for presence that he mentions is 80 degrees, which the Rift manages pretty handily (assuming you don't wear glasses or deviate pretty far from the average IPD). The target for 2015 hardware he discusses is 110 degrees, which the Rift comes pretty close to already.

There's a whole list of areas for improvement for a commercial kit that Oculus is better off focusing on, rather than trying to push the boundaries on FOV, and even among the things they haven't covered, I think the biggest impediment to mass market adoption is figuring out how to hook up the Rift and making it available to applications without it also creating unusable space on your desktop (or requiring you to clone monitors, which reduces FPS overall).

True, with the FOV as it is now you never lose the sense that you've got something blocking your extreme peripheral vision, but that doesn't actually reduce the sense of presence. People who wear goggles and styles of glasses that include side blinders don't feel like they're looking at a virtual world as a result.

I have a few thoughts on how they could reduce the goggle effect a little bit. The most obvious to me was to replicate one of the ambient light systems that sit behind the monitor and use LEDs to throw light onto the wall behind your monitor. Scatter a few RGB LEDs around the edge off the rift display they can then be roughly blended to the edge of rift screen. Say for example you are looking over a green field with a blue sky, the LEDs along the top are go a blue color while along the bottom they are green essentially coloring in the previously black periphery. It is not a true increase in FOV but it would increase immersion and reduce the goggle effect.

Or what about faking a larger FOV by adding mirrors to the left and right ends of the two display halves, which will extend the images with mirrored variants of itself? Perhaps more comfortable than just black borders leading to that tunnel vision experience.

Ambilight alone is good enough, but unfortunatelly, some smartasses have already patented ambilight in an HMDs.

"raidho36" wrote:
Ambilight alone is good enough, but unfortunatelly, some smartasses have already patented ambilight in an HMDs.

Yeah most obvious solutions get patented super fast *shakes fist*. would you happen to know who holds the patent? or the patent title? Just for curiosities sake.

"mrjazz" wrote:
Or what about faking a larger FOV by adding mirrors to the left and right ends of the two display halves, which will extend the images with mirrored variants of itself? Perhaps more comfortable than just black borders leading to that tunnel vision experience.

Your peripheral vision is very sensitive to motion. Adding a mirror would create motion in the opposite direction to your head turn which would be very noticeable and distracting - methinks. :)

"brantlew" wrote:
Your peripheral vision is very sensitive to motion. Adding a mirror would create motion in the opposite direction to your head turn which would be very noticeable and distracting - methinks. :)

Yes, I know what you mean. But because I never got motion sick from kaleidoscopes, I would at least give it a try. :)

beyond the motion issue, your peripheral vision is colourblind :D
the peripheral FOV is mapped to an retinal area only containing cone cells that can't perceive colour. rods, capable of colour vision, are actually restricted to a quite limited foveal area
http://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/thumb/3/3c/Human_photoreceptor_distribution.svg/250px-Human_photoreceptor_distribution.svg.png

however, cones are good at discriminating light and dark, so non-colour leds could already work ;)

Dunno for you, but my far peripheral retina (over 140 degrees) can perceive the color allright. To some extet, it can even perceive fine detail, although just "general color" is good enough for eliminating the horseblinders effect.

Raidho, you sure it's not just that you know what color something should be in your peripheral? Many people know what color it's supposed to be and then assume it's that, although i remember learning that it is basically impossible for you to actually perceive color since you don't have the cones in the spot that processes peripheral vision.