The "REAL" oculus rift?

[danknugz]

Guys, what do you think people who work at oculus have beyond cv1. With all that money at their disposal I find it hard to believe they could stand using a crappy old cv1 when they probably have prototypes of hardware the public won't see for maybe 6 or 7 years.

[DaftnDirect]

Roaster said:

LOL. My idea of great is high contrast with at least 1440 tall screens. Neither of which the Rift provides.
Eyeglass users compare the Rift experience to wearing dirty smudged glasses all day.  They don't mention how nice it is to finally clean them and see again, or getting a new set of glasses to replace your old scratched pair.
You can't clean away the fresnel problem.

Oculus settled for the light smearing thing as being acceptable, and I strongly disagree.  I'll pay a lot more for crisp, clear optics, and heavier too.

That depends on the reference point you're starting from.

7 or 8 years I can remember googling HMDs because I was desperate to experience VR, at that time with flight simulation. I was getting results like the nVisor SX if I wanted a 'good' resolution XVGA unit (with a 5-figure price tag) or an eMagin Z800 for a more reasonably priced SVGA kit. (I think both were around the 45 deg FOV mark).

Yes, the CV1 resolution would be great if it was higher  (not sure what you'd run it on though as we're only now seeing graphics cards emerging that can run CV1 with high settings in AAA games), yes the FOV would be great if it was wider (with increased SDE unless the screen resolution correspondingly increased).

Yes the lenses would be great if they had the larger sweet spot of the Fresnel, the reduced chromatic aberrations of the Fresnels and the absence of light rays of the conventional lenses, it's a trade-off based on what technology is currently available... and what people are prepared to pay for.... not what's being settled for!

Something doesn't stop being great because it isn't perfect, welcome to first generation VR

[jademan]

nalex66 said:

I think eye tracking and foveated rendering are strong possibilities for CV2, along with improved lenses and higher resolution screens.

I would bet money on a foveated solution being in trials right now anyway, and I hope it does work out to give us much more out of the available GPUs. 

And I'd place another bet on hand tracking -- they didn't buy out Nimble VR's Nimble Sense for nothing. At least I hope they didn't cancel my pledge on that for nothing!

[jaimi]

I think the GPU power is perfectly fine for a 4K or 8K screen, even with current devices. The problem is not that you're rendering things with too large pixels, just that the display hardware isn't dense enough. You could render a 2K image per eye, and stretch it to 4K/8K with anti-aliasing, and get a seriously better experience. 

[jon]

I suspect you could do 4k/4k today with a GTX 1080, multi-projection and frame interpolation (like in the PSVR).  So that's possible...

Other than that we've seen Oculus staff wearing units with something similar to a Leap Motion sensor on the front (though not specifically Leap Motion).  I suspect they're also testing possible synergy with Carmack's inside out tracking on gear VR.

... something akin to possibly using their leap-like sensor along with tracked controllers to track your whole upper body when it's in your VR field of view, and then being room aware (akin to the chaperone on the vive).

[kzintzi]

Gotta be honest, I can't see too much of an issue with the FOV - maybe it's because I wear glasses but the horizontal FOV exceeds my "normal" FOV by a fair bit and I rarely try to look outside of the frame of my glasses anyway.

[AndrewJ71]

Interesting point, @kzintzi. I generally wear glasses too and I know exactly what you mean. Hopefully that means the FOV won't bother me when my Rift arrives either. (I was kind of more worried about that than about god rays - though neither was especially concerning).

[kzintzi]

@AndrewJ71, the godrays don't bother me too much - when I do see it, at it's worst it kinda looks like I've stepped out of the cold and they're a little bit fogged but most of the time it just looks like I've been lazy and haven't cleaned them for a bit, and it's not particularly annoying (I've worn glasses every day for the past 30 years and some days I don't even see the frames unless I think about them, as my brain filters them out).. from what other people describe it may be that there is a variation in the lens quality and I just don't have a bad set but I can't say - I know a couple of people who have a headset and say they hate them but none of them wear glasses and I've not seen/used their rifts myself.

one interesting thing I discussed with my optometrist a few years ago (when I wore Contacts for 2 years) is that people who wear glasses full time tend to look with their head instead of their eyes - we will move our eyes slightly to bring things into view immediately, but we naturally try to bring the sweet spot of our lenses into position to look through them - he said it was a well known behavior among optometrists about how people are, and it was easy to tell people who only wore contacts occasionally or were just getting used to them as you could see them still do it..

[Zimtower]

Military 8K VR headsets already exist, and Oculus probably has prototypes of 8K headsets as well. As long as Oculus remains corded, high resolutions are possible. We won't be seeing 4k or 8k headsets in awhile though because consumer hardware to support it isn't there yet.

I am more interested in Oculus developing wireless technology.

[DaftnDirect]

Don't forget the other part of the mix... how take-up affects developer support.

What I mean is, any version of the Rift, present and future, has to be targeted at sufficient people to enable take-up numbers to positively affect software development. If too few people can run the RIft adequately, too few people will buy it

At the moment, a 970 is the minimum for what passes as a good VR experience, a 980ti and above seems to run many (but not all) games at high settings.

Now, as of last month (according to Steam survey), a 970 was owned by 5.13% of people, 980 by 1.04% and 980ti by 0.99% (I can't even find my Titan X on the list!), lets include the AMD cards capable meeting minimum spec... 1.74% (possibly less as all the 200 series seem to be grouped together) and....

Total PCs meeting minimum spec..... 8.9%

Total PCs capable of running most games including AAA titles on high settings (980ti or better).... 1%

So if Oculus make Rifts that push PC specs too high... there won't be enough VR capable gamers out there to make VR software development worthwhile and they risk killing VR.

I think they probably have it about right with the current target percentile but I wouldn't want to see it pushed too much... in maybe a years time, the 1080 & 1070 (and latest AMD offerings) will make up the same percentages as the 970 & above do now. So we shouldn't expect massive jumps in VR capabilities.

DK2: 960 x 1080 pixels per eye.

CV1: 1080 x 1200 per eye - 1.25 times the pixels (25% increase) of DK2 and a reasonable increase in PC requirements.

Single 4k Screen:  4096 x 2160 (2048 x 2160 per eye) - 3.41 times the pixels of CV1 (241% increase).

4k Screen per eye - 6.82 times the pixels of CV1 (582% increase).

So, if you're expecting to go from the 25% improvement that was CV1 over DK2... to the 582% improvement that is dual 4k over CV1, then I think that would kill VR from a developer involvement point of view, even a single 4k screen may be pushing too much, especially if we go to 120 hz.

I'd settle for a 50% increase in pixels/10% increase in FOV.

Edit: corrected DK2 & CV1 res (had listed DK1 & DK2!)