Solving FOV, by taking advantage of the natural acuity curve
Posted: Sun Jun 24, 2012 11:03 am
I think there's a lot to be said for "playing WITH" VR and AR setups, in the sense of understanding the limitations of an inadequate technology, and actively staying within its optimal bounds. There's also a lot to be said for "playing WITH" our brains, and acknowledging the limits of our own "technology," to the effect of fooling our senses and creating illusions. I think these concepts can work together, and in solving the problem of wide FOV, I think they can be especially useful.
The ideal is to create a setup with 180-degree FOV, because that is approximately the range of what our eyes can naturally see. However, as many of us know, the acute range within that is very small; most of our FOV is blurry most of the time (see the Wikipedia diagram). What keeps our world in focus is the constant jumping around of our eyes, which happens at a much larger range, but still nowhere near 180 degrees.
So here's the idea: out of the 180 degrees we're trying to accomodate, only a small part needs to be available in high resolution. The rest can be a blurry mess, and no one will ever know the difference (as long as they play along). A lot of the media that we (or at least I) intend to consume on VR devices is already centre-of-the-screen focused, so avoiding the limits here shouldn't be too great a burden.
What we need to work against is that "display rectangle" that's so prominent in current HMDs. Edges are attractive to our brains, and having them in plain sight completely ruins the immersion. Getting rid of them doesn't require a 180-degree perfect display, but only a 45-degree good one IN FRONT OF a 180-degree terrible one.
Two displays of differing quality, on in front of the other, isn't necessarily the best way to do it, but I think it makes for a good description of the concept. The videos linked below demonstrate roughly the same idea: their software monitors the edges of the screen, then they stretch that out and project it onto walls, to increase the effective FOV.
[youtube]http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=t5sRdBUyr2c[/youtube]
[youtube]http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=koLOyFbqFDU[/youtube]
The ideal is to create a setup with 180-degree FOV, because that is approximately the range of what our eyes can naturally see. However, as many of us know, the acute range within that is very small; most of our FOV is blurry most of the time (see the Wikipedia diagram). What keeps our world in focus is the constant jumping around of our eyes, which happens at a much larger range, but still nowhere near 180 degrees.
So here's the idea: out of the 180 degrees we're trying to accomodate, only a small part needs to be available in high resolution. The rest can be a blurry mess, and no one will ever know the difference (as long as they play along). A lot of the media that we (or at least I) intend to consume on VR devices is already centre-of-the-screen focused, so avoiding the limits here shouldn't be too great a burden.
What we need to work against is that "display rectangle" that's so prominent in current HMDs. Edges are attractive to our brains, and having them in plain sight completely ruins the immersion. Getting rid of them doesn't require a 180-degree perfect display, but only a 45-degree good one IN FRONT OF a 180-degree terrible one.
Two displays of differing quality, on in front of the other, isn't necessarily the best way to do it, but I think it makes for a good description of the concept. The videos linked below demonstrate roughly the same idea: their software monitors the edges of the screen, then they stretch that out and project it onto walls, to increase the effective FOV.
[youtube]http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=t5sRdBUyr2c[/youtube]
[youtube]http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=koLOyFbqFDU[/youtube]