Resolution after 4K?

[Markystal]

Supposedly, 2015 will bring about the coming of 4k/UltraHD in phones and even more powerful hardware to further improve our ability to render to keep up with this. There have been a good few discussions on whether or not the Rift CV1 will support this resolution due to some technical and logistical issues if it releases in 2015, but I'm more curious as to where we'll go from there in the near term (2016,2017,2018?)

So far, the HMDs have been taking advantage of the advancing mobile hardware of phones and tablets (Nexus 7 screen DK1, Nexus 5 in Google Cardboard, Note 3 in DK2, Note 4 in GearVR), which have continually been increasing their resolution in a pixel race since Apple pulled out that "Retina Display" marketing back in 2010, but diminishing returns seem to be kicking in and with 4k being the "new" standard being sold to people, I'm having a hard time imagining that mobile vendors will be able to continue selling things on the benefits of having 5k over 4k on a phone when quad HD isn't much of a jump from 1080p already. This brings to mind the question what VR displays will be doing going forward in that regard if mobile finally steers away from the pixel race (and towards batteries hopefully...just me?)

Facebook, Google, Sony, Samsung, these are some pretty large and pretty powerful companies all playing in the VR space so cost shouldn't be too much of an issue, but I don't think they can exactly justify upping the resolution race further beyond to 5,6, and 8k unless VR takes off next year like an antimatter rocket like phones did to catapult pixel densities, want to eat a loss, or are just simply going to be awesome to the community and dish out advancements for the good of mankind, I don't think they can support such releases year on year. Add in the standard issues with the lack of content much beyond 4k and the technological hurdles that would come in (I don't think a cable that can handle 5k at 90hz has even been announced, let alone made for consumers).

Really, it's making me wonder what kind of release cycle VR hardware will have. Will it be frequently upgraded like smartphones or is it going to be console like where you only upgrade every few years or in generations when new hardware is considerably stronger than the previous technology. In the former case, I think 4k may not be a bad move for Oculus to make since it's the modern standard in some respects and they'd likely want something to be future proof for their next iteration. In the latter, I suppose this wouldn't be too problematic as the tech would just continue to grow as it has for the current pixel race and I'm just thinking about nothing.

Personally, I'd be more interested in increases in the horizontal FOV (vertical fov is good enough for me, though more can't hurt), and curved displays, even if it came at the cost of a bit of resolution (1620 x 3780 seems fine if you ask me), but that's just my take. I wouldn't be surprised if Oculus went with a 1440p display for the CV1, but delaying to release in 2016 for 4k wouldn't surprise me either, but either solution should still provide a pretty awesome experience as far I'm concerned.

In the end, my question kind of hinges on whether or not mobile will continue to push pixels or if VR will do well enough to pay for itself I suppose. I'll be looking at the performance of the Samsung GearVR very carefully for this reason.
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TL:DR
Will HMDs ride off of phone/tablet screen advancements or will it have enough of a push to justify it's own resolution advancements year on year? If so for the latter, what resolutions are you expecting in the coming years.

[EarlGrey]

Resolutions seem to be evolving fast, but the reality is that they aren't. Mobile phone panels have improved, but they've only really reached a resolution that's been mainstream for half a decade, 1920x1080.

Back in 2004 I bought a 24" monitor that was 1920x1200 in resolution, it was relatively high end at the time, but nothing too expensive, a normal Dell monitor. Nearly a year ago I had to replace this seemingly ever-lasting monitor and the available monitors were all 1920x1080, smaller resolution than that was available a decade earlier! So now I use a monitor that has a lower resolution than I used 10 years ago! Sure there are higher resolution monitors available now, but they were not very common a year ago and they were pretty expensive.

Fact is there was a huge stagnation in desktop monitor development. TV's evolved, and desktop panels piggybacked on that. The reason we have cheap 1920x1200 desktop panels is because of the TV market, and the reason we are seeing 4K desktop panels now is because of the TV market, there's a big synergy between those technologies, naturally.

So when it was pointless to make TV sets that had resolution beyond 1080p desktop panel evolution stagnated for a decade.

I predict a similar occurrence for mobile panels.


4K is also not only useless for mobile phone panels, as the eye cannot perceive the increases resolution, but it's also barely usable on TV's smaller than 50"-60" compared to 1080p. But discussing TV's is irrelevant for VR as you cannot piggyback on TV technology for VR.

Predicting an ever decreasing PPI is a naive extrapolation of technological development. In some cases when technology reaches certain level of sufficiency there will be less urgency and investment in evolving a certain aspect further beyond what is needed, capitalism will not allow this. You'll see, after 10 years we'll have nothing beyond 4K panels still.


So in short, beyond 4K it is inevitable that VR headsets will need to incorporate their own specialized VR panels.

[RonsonPL]

Virtual monitor/projector screen should have at least 1080p resolution.
So at 1440p screen, we get 1280x720 per eye in "cinema mode", of which we loose some and gain some:
- loose: the screen isn't covering the whole area. It has to have a margin for slight head movements
- gain: thanx to 2 images for both eyes.

I'm guessing it'll be around 600p then.
At 4K we'll get around 900p.

For true 1080p and above, we need more than 4K. How about 5K?
Would fit perfectly. 1440p per eye, around 1200p for virtual projector screen.

But how long will we have to wait?
- new production line to manufacture such displays
- new cables needed and wireless would be impossible. I don't think even DisplayPort 1.3 would be enough.
- I can't play at 60fps, 3D, 4K per eye, on my gtx760, even when I try games more than a decade old. How much will it take to render 2x 5120x2880 x 1.5 at 100fps?
(x1.5 because lens distortion)
Will cards from 2018 even be able to render 10K polygons scene at such settings?


Here's hoping it will be available in this decade. A display might be manufactured specially for VR, in 2018-19 when VR is popular enough to drive phone displays resolution beyond 4K. The same goes for rendering hardware. Maybe a new PC architecture (we didn't have any major improvement since... AGP actually. Then we got PCI-E 1.0 which was equal, and got slow evolution, but only in terms of bandwidth, but not latency (which creates an obstacle now, for example in GPU physics computing, and probably also in dual-GPU rendering ). Maybe we'll see some drastic changes, unified memory (stacked, not DDR4 which is expected to dominate even in 2020 and far beyond).
Maybe something revolutionary like optical computing or new technologies like Graphen or something.
Either that or we'll have to wait reaaaaally long time for pixe-free VR.
I estimate that for pixel free image,and accommodated scene detail (bigger FOV requires more triangles, better textures and so on) we need as much as 250x the power of fastest single-GPU card of today, or 1000x the power of current consoles like PS4. Or at least 30x if we're talking about scene detail similar to what we see nowadays.

So it might be just as well, that we won't see 5K Rift before 2025...

[andrewtek]

"RonsonPL" wrote:
...So at 1440p screen, we get 1280x720 per eye in "cinema mode"...

Since 1440p is 2560x1440, wouldn't that equate to 1280x1440 per eye?

[MrMonkeybat]

"acarrilho" wrote:
If I get very near to a 4K TV (about Rift panel distance) I can discern the pixels, in which case I'm not sure 4K is enough... :?

When you say "Rift panel distance" I hope you mean when it fills 90 degrees vertical not 3 inches away as that would be comparing 10X lower PPIs as a 4k cell phone screen.

"Mradr" wrote:
I just want to make this clear... resolution and SDE are NOT the same thing and they DO NOT go hand in hand. Asking to increase the resolution to fix the SDE is flat out stupid.

Yes you can also reduce screendoor with difusors but that also reduces brightness and detail at higher ppi these difusors can be thinner. Reducing the gap between pixels means you have the ability to manufacture smaller feature sizes so you might as well increase ppi/resolution at the same time, and it sounds like you are ignoring sub pixels you will still see rainbow effects and red, green or red objects will still use no more than 1/3 of the screen producing screendoor no matter how small the black bars between pixels are unless it uses one of those experimental screen technologies like stacked sub pixels.

"Mradr" wrote:

snip
FOV will increase once we start using bendable screens. That's the best way to do it anyways going forward pass CV1. It'll help remove the lens allowing the screen to be place a bit closer to the face. That alone will help with SDE, FOV, and weight of the device. No more delays tho... 2015 is a good year with a 2k screen if you ask me. They can always release the next version in one-two years time or even a "special edition" version in between years to help fill the gap. It's best at this point to release something that game makers and hardware venders can work with to make VR better. No one is going to spend thousands on research when only a DEV kit is around.

No you definitely still need lenses with curved screens try looking at anything that close to your eye curve or flat for any length of time and you will get severe eye strain unless you have set a world record for nearsightedness. Two flexed screens could still help with Petzval field curvature a bit. But it wont help much with FOV that is still mainly limited by the size of the lenses. Bigger lenses with the same focal length get exponentially thicker with size as the edges get steeper. Infinite Eye uses fresnel lenses with flat screens to achieve over 180 degree FOV.

"Mradr" wrote:

Going forward pass CV2, will be displaying images on the retina instead and that comes with a whole new issues by it self, but new rendering methods will have to be design at that point to deal with the increase bandwidth over cable anyways.

To do retinal projection with a wide FOV an electro optic beam scanning projector combined with a holographic lens is probably needed so you can so that by adjusting the direction and phase of the beam you can get it down the pupil at the correct angle no matter which way your eye is pointing. An electro optic beam scanning projector would also have zero screendoor and no visable sub pixels no matter how low the resolution either. Also could do all the timewarp and distortion by adjusting where it projects each pixel and do foveated projection. You could have a supernatural FOV with 100% or your retina covered at most angles seeing through your nose and eyebrows unless you render your avatars. A foveated projector should not need to be capable of more than a megapixel to cover the entire retina at its maximum resolution. So bandwidth should not be much of a problem for such advanced tech either.

Existing VRDs like Avantglyph have a narrow FOV because moving your eye too much move your pupil out of the focal point. The eye box can be expanded by projecting onto a screen first but that will be just as large as any over screen and lens based HMD like the Rift. And it is hard creating a projection screen with no visible grain at that distance but perhaps holographic films could work.

[acarrilho]

"mrmonkeybat" wrote:
When you say "Rift panel distance" I hope you mean when it fills 90 degrees vertical not 3 inces away as that would be comparing 10X lower PPIs as a 4k cell phone screen.

Thanks, quite the duh moment there, wasn't thinking straight... :roll:

Btw, you meant to quote Mradr on those other bits, not me.

[RonsonPL]

andrewtek

"In cinema mode" is the key here. Movies are in 21:9. It doesn't matter if the virtual screen has 1280x720 or 1280x800 just as it doesn't matter if you view a movie on 1920x1200 monitor or 1920x1080 one.

[MrMonkeybat]

"acarrilho" wrote:

"mrmonkeybat" wrote:
When you say "Rift panel distance" I hope you mean when it fills 90 degrees vertical not 3 inces away as that would be comparing 10X lower PPIs as a 4k cell phone screen.

Thanks, quite the duh moment there, wasn't thinking straight... :roll:

Btw, you meant to quote Mradr on those other bits, not me.

Oops sorry about that I have edited that now.

[AlexiGVS]

EarlGrey
When VR will become a mainstream (like smartphone industry), screen resolution will evolve very fast.. It is a fact.
Facebook will invest a lot of money to make a custom screens for Oculus Rift, I am pretty sure about that.
Palmer Luckey talked about that couple of times.. 0:22



P.s. Resolution of the desktop monitors evovle so slow, because people buy a monitor for a 4-5 years.. And smartphone screens evolve so quick because a lot of people change their phones 1 time a year.

[Welby]

However,don't forget that the resolution is NOT ALL.

With the latest Crescent bay all the people that have tried it,said that the screen-door was almost disappeared. I don't know what resolution have the Crescent Bay but i don't think it was 4K,i think it was not more than 1444p.

Iribe said that a lot of this result was thanks to the new optical lenses and some other software and hardware technology. It's not everything about the resolution.

If we can remove completely the screen-door with a 1444p and some other technology,well.. i'll definitely prefer so.

Less money,more framerate!