A technology like the Avegant Glyph is probably the future of VR. Glyph projects images onto the retinas for outstanding resolution. Probably still some issues to work out, but I can see the day when it replaces physical screens entirely.
Can you do floveation without eye tracking? I mean just have a high resolution area in the center of your field of vision. We usually turn our heads to see things clearly anyway.
No, absolutely not.Think about it. You would move your eyes and see blur everywhere
We already see blur everywhere. In other words, if you move your eye to look at something off center, you'll see what we see now. But if you turn your head and center your eyes you'll get a clear view. Isn't that better than the blur everywhere we have now?
I'm saying maybe that's a compromise until the far more complex problem of eye tracking and high resolution displays can be solved.
My view doesn't look blurry in the current state. I can read text and I hardly notice SDE. If the rendering was dead center in the lens and the view everywhere else was blurred, when you look around without holding your gaze straight ahead, it would look terrible because you couldn't focus.
Whilst this is very interesting tech. I believe we can also get there with more traditional screens and better optics and for a much lower price of entry.
System Specs: MSI NVIDIA RTX 4090 , i5 13700K CPU, 32GB DDR 4 RAM, Win 11 64 Bit OS.
We already see blur everywhere. In other words, if you move your eye to look at something off center, you'll see what we see now. But if you turn your head and center your eyes you'll get a clear view. Isn't that better than the blur everywhere we have now?
I'm saying maybe that's a compromise until the far more complex problem of eye tracking and high resolution displays can be solved.
I think what you're saying is that this technology will improve the center of our vision, while the rest will stay exactly as it is now. While this may sound like a good compromise, it's not ideal in practice.
Human eyes quickly move to look at a location not centered in our view. If the gaze lingers on that location and it's off 'boresight', we instinctively move our head to recenter the eyes to a central position. If you try this with the CV1 you will notice that objects at the fringes are slightly blurry or less detailed but become slightly sharper as they approach the center. You will also notice things like pixel swim or aliasing as you track the object from the edge to the middle of the Rift screen. Now introduce a sharp break from low to high resolution areas, and you'll have a jarring optical break at that boundary. It'll be like having poor eyesight and wearing very strong but very small corrective lenses.
Foveated rendering with eye tracking is an exciting development. It's exciting because it will let developers focus the GPU and bandwidth on areas where the human eye is most discerning while focusing less effort on areas where the human eye is less perceptive. You track where the person is looking and present highest quality imagery only on that part of the screen. Areas outside of the fovea can be rendered at a lower quality - saving resources and cycles. It's about efficiency, but it might improve optical quality if GPUs become the limit, rather than screen pixel density or the optical limits of the lenses.
Trying to improve VR by introducing a high rez panel in the center of the FOV shows a fundamental misunderstanding of how the human eyes track. Worse, it won't benefit from the more efficient processing that foveated rendering and eye tracking will allow. Sure it will look amazing right in the middle of the screen, but the sudden drop to a lower resolution at the boundary will be an instant immersion killer. Try the Vive or DK2 and look at something 20-30 degrees left or right of center. Now do it with the CV1 and notice how much better it looks. Human vision is a combination of eye movement and head turning. This tech will force head turning only, which is not how we work.
Unless you are a cat, then it'll work great.
Any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic.
- Arthur C Clarke
I use glasses which delivers me with approx. 90deg horizontal and 45deg vertical sharp sight. That is all I need. So if we get 200deg fov thats fine. But only the 90/45deg in front of my eyes need to be rendered high res. That should save some gpu computing.
