Oculus Rift Virtual Reality Gaming

http://blogs.valvesoftware.com/abrash/when-it-comes-to-resolution-its-all-relative/

Allow me to poor some cold water all over that excitement. Sploosh! Keep in mind that there is no greater proponent of VR/AR out there than Michael Abrash, nor is there anybody better funded to play in that field.

The short of it? Half of a 1080p panel jammed up against your face gives you about the same pixel density as when we were playing 160x72 resolution games on our 14" monitors. This isn't just low resolution. This is vile resolution. It will be cool, but that cool brings with it some extreme compromises. You think people complained a lot when Nintendo chose motion over 720p? Oculus is as if Nintendo had chosen 256x144 for the Wii in order to hit their motion target.

Ooh! Exercise time! What resolution do you game at on your PC? I run 1920x1080 on my 24" monitors. In order to get a feel for how enormous the pixels are going to be on 1080p Oculus, here's what we do. We go in to our video card control panel and build a custom resolution. For me, that will be 424x240. Now we go find a game that will run at that resolution. Maybe Rage? Let's see!

The dual images do help a bit, but very little. MSAA will be VERY important, but that too will be only a slight improvement. I hope they up the resolution as quick as they can. What would be nice is if they either built in some way to upgrade to another higher resolution screen, at a proper cost, or added an additional part to their business that sold do-it-yourself kits and the necessary interface connectors for available high resolution phone displays.

Alright, I couldn't get Rage running at 424x240. Instead I scaled a 1080p native image down, then back up. So, this is roughly what 1080p Oculus panels will look like in terms of pixel density.

http://cloud.steampowered.com/ugc/1100265829655105753/10F399012F5BA1A8E3C75E510BF500F37738A92C/

You'll note that it feels about the same as Doom 1. You'll also notice that that white lump at center-left is not really distinguishable as a car.

"couldn't 4k x 2k improve that some?"

As Abrash said, 8k x 8k is about ideal. You're looking at a 128 megapixel render instead of today's high-end 6MP. At absolutely optimal Moore's law, that's 7.5 years until we gain that capability. Given that we've been making gains of significantly less than 2x / 18 months in performance in GPUs, focusing more on cost and efficiency, we are likely 15 years out from achievable 128MP rendering in real time. On top of that CPUs have stalled. We've roughly doubled performance since 2004. Far less than the roughly 16x performance improvement from the 8 years from 1996-2004 and 1988-1996.

There is also another enormous problem. Small, high-density 720p panels for the prototype, and tiny 1080p panels for the shipping unit are available because of cellular phones. In the two years since the iPhone 4 hit, there has been a huge push for high-density displays, making them plentiful and cheap. The problem is, Apple called their display "Retina" for a reason. Now that we have almost universally enabled cell phones to exceed our eye's ability to resolve pixels, what is the push to move resolutions higher? 960x640 at 3.5" or 1920x1080 at 5" is as sharp as could be needed. Any extra resolution is throwing processing power, and therefore battery life and weight, at a solution with no benefit. 4k x 2k doesn't look any sharper than 1080p at 5" when held a foot and a half from your head. Neither does 16k x 8x.

So, without cell phones pushing resolution any more, that leaves VR to be the sole pusher of higher density displays. That quickly creates a "chicken and egg" scenario. Nobody makes VR displays because there are no suitable panels. Nobody makes suitable panels because there are no VR displays.

Let's look at my living room now. 10 years ago I had a 27" CRT. Today there is a 64" plasma sitting in there, for not that much more money. The days when we can get flat panels that cover an entire wall are rapidly approaching. I only have four walls to cover. I also now have a motion sensing eye in the room (Kinect) that people have already built solutions for involving full body tracking and display projection within a space. In short, full-room display and tracking is a lot more realistic of a goal, and a lot more viable as to how we get there without any sudden leaps in corporate altruism.

Carmack, Abrash, and Palmer are all brilliant. They are far smarter than any of us here. I fear that they all may be having difficulty keeping realistic expectations due to project proximity.

VR headsets are not toys for children, nor will they be for years to come. The ideal audience for a $300 headset is 18-35 males with disposable income, the same target audience for porn. This is synergy at it's finest.

Parents don't even enter in to the equation. They do not matter.

The device is getting some rave reviews at CES this year. I actually at one point backed the Kickstarter before cancelling it, deciding to wait for the consumer version that they're going to work on after that... but there's still part of me that wishes I hadn't.

I'll take this moment to remind you about the pixels the size of your fist. Shipping Oculus is cool from a dev standpoint, and will be cool in the home for a couple of hours. Then you'll play on a regular monitor again and realize that you can now actually *see* the art that the designers put in the game!

Yeah, that's pretty much what made me decide to back out... not even so much the resolution factor, but the fact that I had a feeling it'd be pretty cool for a few hours and then I'd get bored of it.

The tech sounds fantastic. I can't wait to see how the final consumer product comes together and maybe give it a test drive.

This thing looks very interesting. I think they should have motion tracking gloves to go along with it. I want to look down and see my arm realistically mimicking all my actions. I think that would add that extra level to it.

One small leap for gaming, but one step closer to the Holo Deck.

I don't think you can compare the resolution in the oculus to s normal monitor. the pixel count is denser where you focus, and less dense in your perepheral vision. I bet the consumer version will be awesome as they plan on upping the pixel density

Again, go read my linked post in post #2. Mr. Abrash knows far more about this stuff than any of us can even begin to pretend to know. Remember, this is a guy that Gabe keeps on the payroll to sit at Valve all day just thinking about future problems. He doesn't even contribute anything directly to Valve's games.

In addition, even if their optics tricks moved every one of the one million pixels available from half a 1080p panel to your central vision, it would still be blocky on the level of 640x480, at best. But then of course we'd be right back where we started, VR headsets with tunnel-vision.

Maybe this could be combined with kinect for arm tracking.

They're on record as saying none of the motion control stuff like Kinect has low enough latency for it to work. Kinect introduces something like 10x the latency of the glasses themselves. Something like 30ms vs 300ms.

Kinect is a toy, but with a LEAP motion device hand and finger tracking would work flawlessly! It's 70$ and a collaborative effort between Oculus and LEAP is very likely to happen.





From what i've heard, the low resolution isn't such a big issue as it seems. I think they're doing it right concentrating on the stuff like head tracking, latency and weight first. The consumer version will ship with a higher res display anyway. Upcoming major game titles like Project C.A.R.S and Star Citizen, and last but not least the upcoming games from Valve and id Software will support it from the git go. And i'm sure that there are many other high profile devs among those kickstarter backers.

This video catches the true reactions of people who have tried it very well:





It's not the usual hype around products, many many people wanted something like this to happen since the 90's, but weren't convinced until they saw it in person. Many who got bored of playing in front of a monitor or TV will get back to gaming.

What's up with the sudden rush of random forum users that think they know better about resolution issues than people that spend their lives thinking about these problems?

On one side we have Abrash, Carmack, and Palmer saying "Yup, the poor resolution is totally a major weak point." Then on the other side we've got Random AVS Guy #1 & #2, that it should be noted have never even touched one of these devices, saying "Nah, totally not, bro!".

Only one side of this argument has any credibility.

I've also heard that the resolution will be increased in the consumer version. So it's too early to dismiss it on those grounds, especially since the "low-res" model is still impressive to a ton of folks who have tried it out.

What does change if they think about it? With thinking you won't get higher ppi, they have to wait until higher resolution displays in that form-factor get mass-produced.

"Of course not, dude!".

Developer kits shipping now.

http://www.engadget.com/2013/03/29/oculus-rift-now-shipping/

I'm going to get the consumer version on launch day!!!