Does 3D on an HMD look flat?

[cybereality]

Just wondering, does anyone else think 3D on HMDs a lot of times looks flat? I have noticed this in particular with the prototype HMD PalmerTech made, but I also had this issue with the Vuzix products. Given the same 3D settings (for example, a game with the IZ3D driver or a 3D video) the content looks flatter on the HMD. The content on a 3D monitor just looks better. So far I think small auto-stereoscopic screens look the best to me (Nintendo 3DS, Fujifilm W3) but a a 22-27" monitor still looks pretty good. However the HMDs seem somewhat mild in comparison.

Anyone have this issue? Is it just a matter of the content not being properly optimized? What is the cause?

[STRZ]

When i tried the HMZ it was connected to a 3D Camcorder, very impressive and not flat at all. I think that it's very source dependant if you get good 3D or not. Maybe subjective impression is a factor too ( seeing is believing and vice versa )

Another hobby ofmine is high fidelity audio, and there you have to train our audal "vision" to exactly localize the actors of a band on the virtual stage. Somebody who never experienced this just don't know even what Stereo Audio can do depthwise.

[Okta]

Quite a few people on other forums with the HMZ have mentioned this compared to their 3d tv's. I dont think its the HMZ in particular but an issue with the optical/physical viewing distance from the screen. Usually the further back you sit form your 3d display, the more the depth shows. Being that I use a 40 inch 3d tv monitor at about 40 inch distance i think there is a some depth/3d loss. I theorise this because i tried playing oblivion at a distance on about 12 inches while playing around with the in game FOV settings. It was obvious at that distance that the depth is greatly reduced. Although if i get out of my chair and stand back you get the very pronounced 'doll house effect'. Keep in mind this is regardless of 3d settings.

Perhaps it is the physical and optical combination in some HMD's that don't have enough viewing distance. I can only guess this could be improved by using larger physical displays and being at a greater distance, optically or/and physical.

None of that answers the question of what the cause is though. At a guess, it could the eye lens natural focal length not being fooled by the screen being at an natural range. The eyes focus range as a strong cue for distance even without stereo vision. Al though I am not sure how Fresnel lenses fool this barrier because at a glance it seems they would just fool the separation of the image much like increasing the depth setting in iz3d/ddd.

Too sum up- I think its inappropriate lenses in the HMD's.

ps. Another theory The physical setting separation distance on the displays in a HMD. If they are to much narrower that your eye width, your eyes will be permanently converged onto the screens as if looking at something close and requiring greater software separation settings. And we know the brain uses this cue to calculate distance.

[WiredEarp]

I think its a perceptual issue. When using a screen, the plane that things pop out of is directly in front of your vision. Even if you stand back, its just a few feet away, therefore pop out seems much more pronounced (also, you are getting other cues from things such as the room you are in, the monitor surrounds, etc). Now, when you are using a HMD, the screen is effectively 20 feet at least in front of you. This at least is how far the Z800 seems... its like sitting in the back of a theatre.

Now, even with good popout, the popout with the Z800 on appears to pop out to a distance that would cover the first few 'rows' of the 'theatre'. This means that the popout is not anywhere near as impressive, and it often even looks quite flat, despite definitely displaying in stereo. I've experimented with changing screen sizes without much improvement. However, after actually USING the Z800 for an hour or so, I noticed I now had good popout and 3D. Since nothing had changed, I believe its because my brain has recalibrated to the lack of surroundings to get comparative depth cues from, and once this happens, the 3D effect becomes much more noticeable again.

[STRZ]

Maybe its just looking too natural to get noticed that much, most of the people who jumped on this device never owned a JVC Projector or wa back a Pioneer Kuro TV with great contrast level, so the difference of 3d beeing activated or not is not such a great difference compared to screens with crappy contrast levels in 2d mode they're normally used too. If you ever watched a film on a JVC in an dedicated homecinema or on a Pioneer Kuro you should know how 3dish even 2d can look with great contrast levels.

And i heard videophiles saying that the picturequality on the sony is even in 2d mode on par with those highend devices, especially black level and ansi contrast due to oled. Well have to see it first mself with the right material to confirm it.

[pierreye]

Based on my experience with 3D projector compare to HMD, I think the reason HMD 3D is a bit more subtle is due to no reference to screen distance. Using 3D projector, the max depth I can accept before going cross eye is around 40% in Nvidia 3D settings. For HMD, I can go 100% but still feel very comfortable. The HMD doesn't have a out of screen effect as the screen just float in 3D space. If you think about it, the real world doesn't have a out of screen effect too. It just feel natural in HMD that you don't feel the 3D is too strong. IMAX movie normally had a very extreme pop out screen effect and with HMD, I never once feel any eye strain when the object is near to the eye.

[CyberVillain]

I never understood the desire for pop out 3D, I want a natural and realistic 3D. Too many movies i've seen have pop out 3D, thats why Avatar was such a great Stereo3d movie, it had almost none pop out effects... But last time I looked through a HMD was at a fair back in the VR days in the 90's My 3d experience are only from the cinema and nVidia monitors

edit: By the way, do you guys notice the 3D in every day life?

[Okta]

I never understood the desire for pop out 3D, I want a natural and realistic 3D. Too many movies i've seen have pop out 3D, thats why Avatar was such a greate Stereo3d movie, it had almost none pop out effects... But last time I looked through a HMD was at a fair back in the VR days in the 90's My 3d experience are only from the cinema and nVidia monitors

Popout is far too under utilised now IMHO because of catering to the masses but also is a loss because a lot of the masses don't consider it 3d unless there is popout. It depends if you imagine the screen as the limiting factor in your experience then popout is just ignoring that limit. Having no popout is limiting the experience to the 'fish tank' effect or looking in a another little world through the window. When gaming I want the leaves in my face a i crawl through the scrub stalking an enemy.

Some of the best popout i have seen a movie would be Sammy's Adventures.

[CyberVillain]

I do not have any experience of the Sony HMDyet, but with my 22 inch samsung i do not notice the edges of the screen when immersed, i do not think the fish tank syndrom will be a problem for me, for me immersion and realism is most important and pop out does not help in getting that.. thats my two cents atleast

[Johnny-Mnemonic]

Good part of "3D-ness" from 3D screens are in fact that you constantly move your head in front of the monitor, and you can see as image anomaly shifts, that partially give you an impression that you looking on 3D content. When on HMD, your eyesight is fixed to the screen, how it actually should be. And that's why you getting use to 3D in HMD pretty quickly, in a matter of few minutes, and it doesn't give you the WOW effect anymore, because you perceive it more naturally.

[3dvison]

edit: By the way, do you guys notice the 3D in every day life?

If in real life, I was to throw a baseball at your head, would you try to catch it or maybe even duck ?
So in every day life, do I, or you, notice 3D ?
The answer is as plain as that baseball coming at your head in all its 3D glory...LOL...Made you flinch.

[3dvison]

If sony had a boarder option in the menu, so you could choose to turn a boarder on or off. It would only need to be one or two pixels wide around the edge of the screen with a dimmer control so you could set it to whatever brightness you like. I bet with that option, the 3D would jump off the screen and poke you in the eyes...

[brantlew]

Good part of "3D-ness" from 3D screens are in fact that you constantly move your head in front of the monitor, and you can see as image anomaly shifts

That doesn't make sense to me. It seems like you are describing a holographic display where there are many angles encoded in the data and you can perceive different viewpoints as you move your head. But stereographic signals only encode two viewpoints so you can never perceive other angles as you move you head - at least that is how I understand it. Am I missing something?

[3dvison]

Good part of "3D-ness" from 3D screens are in fact that you constantly move your head in front of the monitor, and you can see as image anomaly shifts

That doesn't make sense to me. It seems like you are describing a holographic display where there are many angles encoded in the data and you can perceive different viewpoints as you move your head. But stereographic signals only encode two viewpoints so you can never perceive other angles as you move you head - at least that is how I understand it. Am I missing something?

I have a Fuji W3 camera and moving your head within the viewing sweet spot does make it look/feel as if you are moving around inside the picture and seeing it from different angles. It works in all directions, (left,right,up,down and moving your head closer or farther away from the picture.
Its a very small zone that this works in, but it is there.

[WiredEarp]

I don't know how much this parallax effect contributes, but I suspect it helps somewhat. I think he is talking about the fact that if you move your head L/R, its obviously a 3D image as the furthest parts of the scene appear to move as well. Dont know why this effect happens however, but it probably does help immersion a little by providing more cues.

Re popout realism, I definitely find a little bit of popout helps the realism. In flight sims, it makes the dash, stick, or other objects 'pop out' and look real. In FPS's, your gun is partly popped out (at least the way I set it up) and seems more 'real' as its sticking out of the screen into your face in a similar way to reality. Also, for games with lots of foliage, its really awesome to have some popout, as it means it looks as tho the trees and leaves etc are actually BESIDE YOU sometimes, due to them popping out. Its also good when people shoot arrows at you (skyrim!) or RPGs (COD).

My usual setup involves changing the convergence so that the UI elements are usually sharp and everything is fishtank unless you get stuff very close to the near plane in which case it pops out. This is an awesome setting for playing racing or motorbike games from external views. I have one game that I use as a demo where the little guy on the motorcycle looks like his front wheel is about 3mm away from entering the screen, and the entire bike looks like its outside the screen racing in. This is very amusing when you crash and the little guy flys off and flies into the screen and rolls along the fishtank ground

[brantlew]

Maybe JM is talking about the fact that you can never change the orientation of your view frustrum with respect to the screen. I'm fairly new to HMD's so I still find this somewhat disconcerting (almost claustrophobic) at times that the screen stays directly in front of my eyes always.

With a 3D screen in physical space you have all these slight motions of your head with respect to the screen that cue you to the location of the screen in space and thus to the apparent physical location of the 3D content. However when everything is "locked" onto your local reference frame maybe you don't get as much of a sensation of external locality. That's probably a crappy explanation - its difficult to describe. Anyway I could see how that might break the illusion a bit.

On the flip-side though if you have head-tracked dynamic 3D content, I would expect the 3D illusion to be intensified because all the head motion cues would be intact plus you really do have access to all viewpoints instead of just two fixed viewpoints.

[Chiefwinston]

I have a pretty nice home 3D HDTV set-up. And I've been waiting for cyber's and palmertech's reviews of the Sony HMD. I know you guys have demoed some units. But thats not the same as sitting down with an HMD and running all kinds of apps through it. Any time frame guys? Or did I already miss the show?

cheers

[cybereality]

I will be getting an HMZ-T1 pretty soon, probably in February. Of course I will take it through the paces.

[PalmerTech]

A large part of it is having the content optimized well. I don't know all the technical reasons, but I know one is that the view frustum parameters for proper 3DTV use are different than the ones for proper HMD use. My HMD has a few Unity environments that were optimized for it, and even though it was just a quick test (No distortion correction or anything), you still get fantastic stereo. You cannot quite call it "pop out" when you can hardly see/focus on the edges of the screen, but things still look like they are going to poke you in the eye! I wanted to send them to Cyber along with the HMD, but the builds I have on my laptop only function if they are hooked into the tracking system at my job.

Another thing that is only partially on-topic: Orthostereo, the idea that what you see perfectly matches what is seen in real life, makes a HUGE difference. When everything you are looking at is life sized, something clicks that makes it seem a lot more real! I think that is one of the reasons that 3D projector systems work so much better than low FOV HMDs, things are a lot closer to life sized when compared to 35 degrees.

[WiredEarp]

Yep, those LEEP guys reckoned that made a massive difference. I think they reckoned having wide FOV plus the correct setup to match real life gave more immersion than adding stereo.

[PalmerTech]

Yes, it does make a huge difference. And obviously, if you present a stereoscopic image to each eye that is the same FOV physically and virtually as in real life, you should see stereo exactly as you do in real life. Definitely not flat.

[vulkan]

I think that is one of the reasons that 3D projector systems work so much better than low FOV HMDs, things are a lot closer to life sized when compared to 35 degrees.

I find 'pop-in' is more effective in HMD"s. Most of my HMD use is gaming, flight sims, where the pop-out effect is not wanted. My Z800 absolutely rocked for this with Aces High and FSX. The Vuzix 1200VR is a bit meh, I suspect that the lack of 3D setting tweaks available is the culprit.

One thing I do notice is if I watch a video where the 3D seems well optimized that it looks like a model/dollhouse effect. You known those photo's that have the focus tweaked to give things a 'model railway' look - 3D videos on the HMD's remind me of that.

If you really want to test HMD 3D video the Crysis 3D fly through in youtube is the best I've seen so far.

[WiredEarp]

I notice I get this effect (dolls house) when I turn up the separation in Black Shark. I guess this probably means that I don't have it setup properly, as I normally only run with about 10-12 clicks of separation.

Sims are some of the best things for 3D. It adds heaps having the dash, stick, etc, looking like it is literally right in front of you!

[Chiefwinston]

Thanks guys. I'm looking forward to getting a HMZ-T1 soon. And I respect your opinions on this subject. I have never owned a HMD. But I know from my own experiences from 1996 to the present- 3D can require patient tweaking for the best results. And many of you seam to understand that. So thank you.


And cheers