Meant to be Seen

Sounds like great progress in method to move varifocal lens (improving 3D perception of near objects, like UI menus). See https://www.roadtovr.com/oculus-half-do ... ect-6/amp/. No discussion about any near term release date (or needed resolution improvement - high res varifocal display would really help), but great to see this on-going research...

Pimax is also changing their HMD - see https://uploadvr.com/pimax-8kx/. No upgrade path for my Pimax 8K, only discount on new HMD. I would not recommend this path unless Pimax improves optical distortion at outer edges of FOV, and uses OLED display. Note that the lower resolution Pimax 8K fulls loads my 2080 Ti - the higher resolution version needs either optional eye-tracking module, or next gen Ti GPU.

Not sure what HTC (Vive) is doing, beyond trying to financially survive. Lens-modified Vive Pro (wireless connection) still my favorite HMD (prefer its OLED display to Index display).

Oculus describes a more complete vision for future VR interaction in another recent presentation - see https://uploadvr.com/frl-next-gen-integrated-prototype/.

Personally, I am pondering why someone thought it would be a good idea to replicate depth of field in VR.

When in VR or s3D, I love the fact that I can focus on all aspects of the scene without having to focus on different depths - this is especially advantages in action scenes.

Our eyes have to put up with depth of field because the living lenses in our eyes have to focus incoming light - DOF is a side-effect of this focus - depth of field is therefore a bug that evolution never managed to resolve, - it's not a feature.

'Lacking' focus ability might reduce immersion by a fraction but IMHO it is not noticeable - the time and development resources put into this tech seem to me to be wasted opportunity - foveated rendering would have been a far more attainable and spectacularly more advantageous feature of any new headset.



It's a shame this project was cancelled by Oculus some time ago...

I agree that varifocal lens capabilities are less important than foveal rendering (and its associated major image pipeline processing changes), but varifocal lens motion is meant to reduce physiological problems when eye accommodation reflex does not match convergence when looking at close objects - more than creating DOF. Varifocal lens capabilities will add to HMD costs, so the question is will the marginal benefit (and potentially larger user base because of fewer discomfort and vision problems) be worth the expense? Varifocal configurations also enable lower resolution (cheaper) background display screen(s) to be combined with higher resolution moving (eye-tracked) micro displays.

Varjo has announced new (very expensive) enterprise VR HMDs also with combined displays - see https://uploadvr.com/varjo-vr-2/ and https://www.roadtovr.com/varjo-vr-2-hea ... a-display/.