Oculus Rift’s creator wants to double VR screen resolution within a year
By Tim Colwill on January 10, 2013 at 8:19 pm
Our very own Cas Bitton gently chided me today for not mentioning the Oculus Rift more on this fine site, and you know what: he’s right! The Oculus Rift is, in case you’re not down with the cool kids, a virtual reality headset that blasted through its Kickstarter goal and is now being supported by all sorts of industry big names, including Epic, Valve and Notch.
Now its creator, 20-year old Palmer Luckey, has been hitting the streets of CES to talk about his plans for the device and where he sees it going — including his belief that they’ll be able to build a new kit with double the resolution of the current model within the year.
“I do think resolution needs to be better for the best VR, but even at low resolution you can get a good experience,” he said in response to Valve engineer Michael Abrash’s comments on VR.
“I’m not going to say that this is the best experience, or that resolution isn’t important; it’s a really critical factor and this is good as it gets today. We’re going to be building one at double this resolution within a year and even more after that, so there’s a lot of other things to work on besides resolution. We can’t just sit around and wait for 4K displays to hop around.”
Luckey also revealed that delays on the unit were due to an unavoidable problem where the screen panel manufacturer didn’t reveal the screen they were selling the Rift team was an end-of-life product, and thus could not meet the unforeseen demand of the Kickstarter.
For more on the Oculus Rift, check out this excellent hands-on from The Verge (skip to about 19 minutes for Rift action) or hit up the official site.
Source: PC Gamer
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I was a hair’s breadth away from supporting the kickstarter, but it was really targeted at devs. Been following this since last year, the moment they release the consumer version I’m getting one. It’s going to be a lot cheaper and more immersive than a 3D monitor with glasses…
It definitely needs a larger resolution. Specifically it needs full frame 1080p. Currently it uses side by side 1280×800 meaning each screen’s rez is only 640×800 with the horizontal part stretched. It causes the image to look blurry.
Other than that this is something I keenly have my eye on. Anyone know if the two screens are on at the same time or if they alternate like active glasses? (hopefully the former, active frame sequential 3D needs to die)
It’s one screen.
What happened to this?
Surely that still applies…
Palmer actually addressed that in an interview a week or two ago. Saw it on RockPaperShotgun or PCGamer (can’t remember now).
The thing is the consumer units (not the current gen developer units) will be the full 1080p per eye. Whereas the current dev units aren’t. In the Nov/Dec crunch they had to do a unit redesign for manufacturing as they had to change screen type as they needed 9000, where the electronics supplier of the screen only had 5000 of the original screens (end of line product). So they switched screens which delayed sending the units out by a couple of months, though the new screens are apparently about twice as good as the old ones for a similar price and aren’t end of line.
Holy crap, the pixel density of a 3840×1080 screen would be pretty harsh to make in that size. Though for something like Skyrim, if it was made into a proper VR, gonna need a hardwearing treadmill, that can work in any direction…
LOL Virtual Reality, making Gamers the fittest beings on the planet :D
As long as they get 1080p per eye eventually all is good. To me the blur that’s created by doing half resolution is a deal breaker. It’s why I don’t do 3D with my monitor given you can’t do frame sequential on Tridef with nVidia cards.
If it’s just one screen how does each eye distinguish what pixels it’s meant to see? Or is it split in half right down the middle?
I think it’s split down the middle with spherical lenses that combine them into true 3D and a post effect shader to correct the fisheye effect from the wide FOV.
What blur is created?
In time when we have had time to work with the developer kit the software will scale to support future products with increased fov/resolution/whatever else. Considering this is a taste and not a consumer product at this time I’m unsure what the issue is.
If you are unsure about the rift, or are making amazing assumptions click the other links mentioned in this article. I’ll paste them here to save you the trouble :).
http://www.youtube.com/watch?feature=player_embedded&v=LCB19lzAXS8#at=1147
http://www.oculusvr.com
http://www.pcgamer.com/2013/01/08/oculus-rift-creator-palmer-luckey-on-the-future-of-vr-well-double-the-resolution-within-a-year/
Have you ever used side by side 3D on a normal screen? If you have you’ll know what i’m talking about. For all I know VR doesn’t suffer from the same blurriness but I don’t know.
Also i’m not saying there’s an issue per say. Just saying that it needs to be 1080p per eye for the consumer version. It *sounds* like they’re aiming for that so there shouldn’t be a problem though they haven’t really given specifics yet for obvious reasons.
mebbe its one of yer eyes thats making it blury?
just a thought :)
Looking forward to giving this a crack with some sims. DCS A10 comes to mind. Track IR didn’t really do it for me.
And this is how we found out that exe3 is blind in one eye…
Have you used binoculars before? or anything head mounted that uses spherical lenses (as sh0v0r mentioned)?
Are they a blur?
A simple way to describe it is it’s the same blur that comes from stretching a 1280×720 image to fill a 1920×1080 screen ala interpolation.
Essentially what happens with side by side 3D is that if you have a 1920×1080 screen the game is rendered in two images both being of a resolution of 960×1080 keeping the 16:9 ratio. If your 3D glasses haven’t been activated yet they’ll actually be displayed next to each other on the screen. When 3D is enabled these two images will alternate as per normal but the vertical 960 lines will be stretched to fill the 1920 lines of your monitor, thus interpolation occurs which causes it to blur a bit.
According to wikipedia the dev kit for occulus rift is 1280×800 with 640×800 being each eye. My concern is whether the 640×800 will be stretching the 640 lines to preserve a 16:10 ratio which will cause blur as that’s just simply interpolation. Then again just thinking about it I could be completely wrong here as I just realized based on past comments interpolation may not happen as the pixels will be stretched via lenses rather than over more pixels. If that’s the case you guys could’ve just said that rather than claim I was blind. :/
But even so having full 1080p per eye would be nice for the pure clarity.
Then again maybe 640×800 is actually the intended resolution from the dev kit so you’ll be seeing a weird 4:5 ratio, I don’t know, I want to though because I want to understand what is happening with the screen tech. I doubt it though given the demo vids have shown it off as if it’s widescreen.
The aspect ratio is almost irrelevant because of the FOV reach and head tracking.
Watch this, seriously it takes less then 5 minutes to understand it’s impact.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?feature=player_embedded&v=LCB19lzAXS8#at=1147
Ah thanks that shows what I was after (my bad for not looking at it earlier :S ). Currently it has odd ratio to it that’s all.
The consumer version will have a wider FoV though, I just can’t imagine them not doing it as while you can tilt your head what they showed was excessively narrow imo.
And I know the impact of it, I just think it has another use for older games with straight 3D as well. I’d love to get my hands on one to play Borderlands 2 or BC2 in 3D without the ghosting cross-talk and headaches/eyestrain of active glasses and without having to sacrifice half the resolution with passive screens.