what makes a game 3d effect?

It's just the game itself should have Rift support. Otherwise, you're stuck with shitty workarounds.

Period.

"raidho36" wrote:
It's just the game itself should have Rift support. Otherwise, you're stuck with shitty workarounds.

Period.

pretty much this, but to elaborate, there are a bunch of factors that allow the brain to interpret 3D space, and games without rift support fall short a few specific ways.

The fov drastically changes the perspective, or foreshortening, of an object, making it a very important factor. Take a photo close up of a persons face from a few feet away, then take another standing a few hundred feet back, but zoomed in so the face still fills the whole frame. You will notice that in the first picture, the persons nose is larger and their ears are smaller. You may also notice that objects in the background of the second picture appear much larger than in the first. FOV determines the rate at which an object gets smaller as it recedes into the backround, which can "flatten" an image if done improperly.

The offset of the two in game cameras can be poorly adjusted as well. The closer one camera gets to another, the less data your brain will recieve about the sides of any object you are seeing, and the flatter the image will appear.

One very overlooked problem in games is the center of the image on each screen doesn't line up with the center of your eyes (a difference of pupillary distance). A better device would allow you to adjust the lenses, and a better game would attempt to compensate. The only one I know of which allows you to calibrate the image for each eye is team fortress. I suggest playing with and without calibration to see what I mean.

"needsloomis" wrote:

"raidho36" wrote:
It's just the game itself should have Rift support. Otherwise, you're stuck with shitty workarounds.

Period.

pretty much this, but to elaborate, there are a bunch of factors that allow the brain to interpret 3D space, and games without rift support fall short a few specific ways.

The fov drastically changes the perspective, or foreshortening, of an object, making it a very important factor. Take a photo close up of a persons face from a few feet away, then take another standing a few hundred feet back, but zoomed in so the face still fills the whole frame. You will notice that in the first picture, the persons nose is larger and their ears are smaller. You may also notice that objects in the background of the second picture appear much larger than in the first. FOV determines the rate at which an object gets smaller as it recedes into the backround, which can "flatten" an image if done improperly.

The offset of the two in game cameras can be poorly adjusted as well. The closer one camera gets to another, the less data your brain will recieve about the sides of any object you are seeing, and the flatter the image will appear.

One very overlooked problem in games is the center of the image on each screen doesn't line up with the center of your eyes (a difference of pupillary distance). A better device would allow you to adjust the lenses, and a better game would attempt to compensate. The only one I know of which allows you to calibrate the image for each eye is team fortress. I suggest playing with and without calibration to see what I mean.

Great information to know! Good post.

The biggest problem is probably game world scale. Without knowing how the game units correspond to real world units, there's no way to know how far apart the cameras should be to match real eye distance. Some games work in metres, some in centimetres, some in imperial, some use custom units (Unreal is roughly 16 units = 1 foot).