VR Will Never Be The Same For Me: StarVR Has Shown Me Future

[kcarbotte]

Immersed Toronto is underway, and StarVR is on site showing off the company’s prototype HMD with its ultra wide FOV. There’s still plenty of work to do, but it’s pretty clear that a wider viewing angle offers a very compelling experience.

VR Will Never Be The Same For Me: StarVR Has Shown Me Future : Read more

 

[cats_Paw]

You know nothing, john snow.
Sorry wrong quote.

VR still ash a huge way to go (especially in horsepower required, think Unreal Engine 4, Infiltrator demo, open world AND VR).

According to rough estimates, we are talking 3-5 years at least until its affordable.
And that presumes the companies that have been making utter crap (triple A companies) will suddenly start to do good games.

 

[chicofehr]

I'm sure they will all have wide FOV soon. FOV is so important if you play triple monitor and using VR is like sitting close to 3 monitors. Narrow FOV can make you dizzy or nauseous so I can understand with 3x30" screens. I hope this makes more games have a proper FOV dial in the settings. Editing the ini or having to do a mod is annoying. Not sure how the older games will work with this.

 

[Vorador2]

To be blunt, the FOV is too wide. Human binocular FOV is 115º while full FOV is about 165º. This device has a FOV of 215º. While it's not a problem per se, you're wasting rendering power into parts of the screen you can't see. While a good driver could reduce this problem by lowering rendering quality on the edges of the screen, you're still paying for screen state you can't use.

As i see it, we need to hit the 150-165º FOV, but more of that is a waste.

 

[alidan]

To be blunt, the FOV is too wide. Human binocular FOV is 115º while full FOV is about 165º. This device has a FOV of 215º. While it's not a problem per se, you're wasting rendering power into parts of the screen you can't see. While a good driver could reduce this problem by lowering rendering quality on the edges of the screen, you're still paying for screen state you can't use.

As i see it, we need to hit the 150-165º FOV, but more of that is a waste.

im assuming they are also taking into account moving your eyes from left to right, so no matter where you look, you see screen.

 

[Vorador2]

im assuming they are also taking into account moving your eyes from left to right, so no matter where you look, you see screen.

Good optics and/or pupil tracking can take that into account. Oh well, we're still on the experimenting phase. There's time for refinements.

 

[jockemedw]

http://starbreeze.com/2015/09/starbreeze-in-collaboration-with-tobii-to-integrate-its-world-leading-eye-tracking-technology-into-the-unique-210-degree-5k-resolution-starvr-hmd/

Luckilly - Starbreeze seems to have a plan for the "waste of rendering power"-part. I see no real competition in any of the other VR headsets (as of today).

 

[SCREAM2NIGHT]

I also had a chance to try out thr VR headset at immersed Toronto and I thought it was awesome except for 3 things.
The first probleam was the blur, at times it felt like watching a 3d movie without glasses. The second issue was it felt like I was zoomed in on the title screen ( I had to move my head to read all of the title - however this might be intentional) and the third probleam was that the shotgun wasnt sinked up right to the headset and was off by i would guess 7 to 10 degrees. There was also one time when I looked behind me that the framerate went down to around the 15 mark. It was still an amazing experence though and I got a free hat so I cant complain.

 

[velocityg4]

Although it may seem neat I doubt VR headsets will be more than a niche product. Most people won't want to wear such bulky and complicated products. Just having to wear glasses killed 3DTV. Most people that got one tried the glasses once or twice. Didn't like them and returned to standard HD content.

As there will be so few people using them. Most games won't support them. Just as 3DTV had a meteoric rise before crashing. Publishers will be enthusiastic for a while then abandon the technology. When they realize it costs them more to support the technology then they get in sales.

Also there is no standard for VR. If publishers have to design support for each competing brand. VR will die a very quick death.

 

[scolaner]

Although it may seem neat I doubt VR headsets will be more than a niche product. Most people won't want to wear such bulky and complicated products. Just having to wear glasses killed 3DTV. Most people that got one tried the glasses once or twice. Didn't like them and returned to standard HD content.

As there will be so few people using them. Most games won't support them. Just as 3DTV had a meteoric rise before crashing. Publishers will be enthusiastic for a while then abandon the technology. When they realize it costs them more to support the technology then they get in sales.

Also there is no standard for VR. If publishers have to design support for each competing brand. VR will die a very quick death.

Although I certainly agree with the sentiment that investing heavily in VR is a risk--I mean, there are no high-end HMDs on the market yet, even though the final prototypes are amazing--I disagree with some of your other points.

First, IMHO, VR/AR is significantly more compelling as a technology, and in terms of possible use cases, than 3D ever was.

At first, of course, VR/AR will be nichey, but you could argue the same of PC gaming. THAT is technically a niche, but obviously it's also mega business. Same with consoles.

The big key is content. Content, content, content. I asked Brendan Iribe back at CES why I couldn't buy a Rift yet. He basically said that the content ecosystem just wasn't there yet. He was right. But there are some really great things happening in the content world:

1) Game publishers are investing into VR titles (or VR derivatives of titles). You're correct that it's a big investment, and it may prove financially troubling, but I think the payoff will be big enough in the end. I think. I hope.

2) I think you have a compelling point about the lack of a standard for VR, but Epic is working very hard to create a de facto standard. We've covered this numerous times, including:

http://www.tomshardware.com/news/immersed-europe-james-golding-epic-games,29957.html
http://www.tomshardware.com/news/immersed-europe-keynote-vr-audio,30037.html

3) Homemade content. This is a quiet little section of the VR/AR world, but it's going to make all the difference: There are more and more 360-degree cameras coming to market. And YouTube supports 360-degree content. Which means that you and I and everyone else will soon be able to create content that will work on YouTube and inside of VR HMDs. That's HUGE. Even moreso because you can grab a cheap Google Cardboard HMD ($20!!), pop in the phone you already have, and view all kinds of cool content.

Kind of like this: http://www.tomshardware.com/news/oneplus-2-vr-launch-event,29689.html

You can use your imagination on what's possible...

(Sorry, it appears I've written an entire article here, heh...)

 

[dstarr3]

Put four Titans in the headset. Simple.

 

[agentbb007]

I was just thinking about how cool a wide FOV VR device would be and here it is

 

[DrakeFS]

Although it may seem neat I doubt VR headsets will be more than a niche product. Most people won't want to wear such bulky and complicated products. Just having to wear glasses killed 3DTV. Most people that got one tried the glasses once or twice. Didn't like them and returned to standard HD content.

As there will be so few people using them. Most games won't support them. Just as 3DTV had a meteoric rise before crashing. Publishers will be enthusiastic for a while then abandon the technology. When they realize it costs them more to support the technology then they get in sales.

Also there is no standard for VR. If publishers have to design support for each competing brand. VR will die a very quick death.

Gaming is already a niche market. I am fairly sure the number of TV owners vs number of console owners is a significant gap. Same would go for the number of PC owners vs the number of Gaming GPU owners. However the gaming market is profitable and it is not a stretch to see a major adoption of VR by the gaming market. Not only that, but VR may be the killer "platform" for 3D entertainment. If you buy VR Hardware for gaming but it also happens to be great for 3D movies\TV, that gives an installed base (if VR for gaming does take off) for production studios to target.

I think the standard is going to come from the engines developers use. So each VR kit will have to work will with only 4 or 5 major engines at first.

 

[RazberyBandit]

I'd really like an honest review for all VR HMDs from someone who is far-sighted. They all appear to be troublesome for the far-sighted due to the close proximity of the screens/lenses to the eye, but I've never read a review by someone who is even the least bit far-sighted.

 

[computerguy72]

Although it may seem neat I doubt VR headsets will be more than a niche product. Most people won't want to wear such bulky and complicated products. Just having to wear glasses killed 3DTV. Most people that got one tried the glasses once or twice. Didn't like them and returned to standard HD content.

As there will be so few people using them. Most games won't support them. Just as 3DTV had a meteoric rise before crashing. Publishers will be enthusiastic for a while then abandon the technology. When they realize it costs them more to support the technology then they get in sales.

Also there is no standard for VR. If publishers have to design support for each competing brand. VR will die a very quick death.

Your thought process is all wrong...
1) FB put $2B into this and has massive reach. Everything before was truly niche oriented and niche funded. OVR was the first truly capitalized effort. Results of that level of content and support totally unknown.
2) Sony and Valve jumped in with fully capitalized efforts as well. This will result in a lot of people exposed to the tech. Valve has legions of fans via Steam. Ultimate results unknown.
3) All sorts of ancillary practical uses for this tech. Comparing it to '3D' is just plain silly.
4) This is the best avenue for Nvidia, AMD and Intel to increase sales of gaming hardware. The level of tie-in's will be enormous. Until this there was no true driving incentive for the millions of people with gaming rigs to maintain the rapid upgrade pace of the past. Now there is. Effects of all this promotion, unknown.
5) The levels of wind blowing this is almost a phenomenon. It's caused lots of AAA titles to jump in furthering the adoption. 1000x anything 3D TV ever experienced.
6) The social aspects of this will add to it as well. Think about what happened with the wiimote for example. This is the same thing but far better.
7) This is the next step for 3D engine producers. Their chance to expand the business.

Without something like VR really many of these 7 things have few places to go to drive sales. The level of force pushing this will be enormous for many years. I think with this much going for it VR has a chance to break out in ways we havent seen in a long time.

 

[none12345]

Wide FOV is an absolute necessity. The FOV of the display needs to be bigger then human FOV because the goggles are fixed to your head, and your eyes can move side to side, up and down. So it needs to account for that.

A quick note about power, and screen size. Its not strictly true that we need mega horse power for this. What you need is a rendering engine that understands human vision. Human vision has different levels of detail the in different areas of the FOV. There is only a relatively small area of high definition in human vision, the rest is fairly low def.

With a fixed monitor, you need to render every part of the screen at the same resolution, because you dont know where someone is going to look at it. When you have a goggle system, you can add eye tracking, and once you have that, you can render where the eyes are looking at very high definition, and the rest of the image at low resolution. This would drastically reduce computing power while leaving the image looking pristine. Obviously you need a high def screen to make it work, and low latency.

Really you need the equivalent of about an 8k screen for each eye, but you wont need to render the equivalent of 16k, you'd probably be rendering more like 4k. Or with today's tech, they could use dual 4k screens, and render about 2k of detail. You could see the pixels with that, but certainly doable with todays tech.

 

[scolaner]

I'd really like an honest review for all VR HMDs from someone who is far-sighted. They all appear to be troublesome for the far-sighted due to the close proximity of the screens/lenses to the eye, but I've never read a review by someone who is even the least bit far-sighted.

You mean using it without corrective lenses?

 

[InvalidError]

As i see it, we need to hit the 150-165º FOV, but more of that is a waste.

im assuming they are also taking into account moving your eyes from left to right, so no matter where you look, you see screen.

But once you get more than about 20 degrees off-center, your ability to make out details drops drastically:I bet that as your eyes focus on *this* word, you cannot clearly distinguish surrounding words more than a dozen characters in any direction.

Since peripheral vision is so pathetic, a compute-efficient VR implementation could get away with rendering a peripheral vision image at something like 720p and then blending in a 1024x1024 focus area determined by eye-tracking.

 

[Solandri]

I'd really like an honest review for all VR HMDs from someone who is far-sighted. They all appear to be troublesome for the far-sighted due to the close proximity of the screens/lenses to the eye, but I've never read a review by someone who is even the least bit far-sighted.

There's a lens between your eye and the screen which moves the effective focus distance of the screen much further away. I guess the current generation never played video games at arcades so haven't seen these. They were used in a few arcade games in the 1970s-1990s to make it look like you were shooting at targets that were really far away (hundreds of meters).

So being far-sighted shouldn't be a problem. It's actually near-sighted people who have a problem with these, unless they can wear their glasses at the same time.

As i see it, we need to hit the 150-165º FOV, but more of that is a waste.

im assuming they are also taking into account moving your eyes from left to right, so no matter where you look, you see screen.

But once you get more than about 20 degrees off-center, your ability to make out details drops drastically:I bet that as your eyes focus on *this* word, you cannot clearly distinguish surrounding words more than a dozen characters in any direction.

Since peripheral vision is so pathetic, a compute-efficient VR implementation could get away with rendering a peripheral vision image at something like 720p and then blending in a 1024x1024 focus area determined by eye-tracking.

Yeah, that's the way I see this tech developing. Right now the resolution is just way too low. 20/20 vision is the ability to detect a line pair with one arc-minute of separation. So 2 pixels per arc-minute. If you make a VR display 150 degrees vertically, 210 degrees horizontally, and want it to be high enough resolution to fool 20/20 vision, you're talking 25200x18000 pixels. Two orders of magnitude higher than the typical monitors used for gaming.

It'll be decades before GPUs advance enough to generate images at that resolution at 60 or even 30 fps. So some sort of eye-tracking mechanism which figures out where you're looking, and only generates high-res images at that location is going to be the way to go. It's not like a traditional monitor where more than one person may be viewing it at a time. There is literally just one eyeball on each screen with a rig like this.

The curve will probably be better handled by OLEDs or quantum dots placed on a plastic substrate. While fresnel lenses work, they can get bulky and tend to blur the image if there's the slightest misalignment between the screen and lens.

Another way I could see this playing out is what they use for airliner flight simulators. Those project onto a screen, then bounce the image through two sets of curved mirrors to both enlarge the field of view and give the illusion of distance. That would probably be a bit too bulky for something mounted on your head, but the field is young and I don't want to discount anything.

 

[alidan]

Although it may seem neat I doubt VR headsets will be more than a niche product. Most people won't want to wear such bulky and complicated products. Just having to wear glasses killed 3DTV. Most people that got one tried the glasses once or twice. Didn't like them and returned to standard HD content.

As there will be so few people using them. Most games won't support them. Just as 3DTV had a meteoric rise before crashing. Publishers will be enthusiastic for a while then abandon the technology. When they realize it costs them more to support the technology then they get in sales.

Also there is no standard for VR. If publishers have to design support for each competing brand. VR will die a very quick death.

Gaming is already a niche market. I am fairly sure the number of TV owners vs number of console owners is a significant gap. Same would go for the number of PC owners vs the number of Gaming GPU owners. However the gaming market is profitable and it is not a stretch to see a major adoption of VR by the gaming market. Not only that, but VR may be the killer "platform" for 3D entertainment. If you buy VR Hardware for gaming but it also happens to be great for 3D movies\TV, that gives an installed base (if VR for gaming does take off) for production studios to target.

I think the standard is going to come from the engines developers use. So each VR kit will have to work will with only 4 or 5 major engines at first.

lets just leave these numbers here
155 million - ps2
102 million - ps1
154.01 million - nds
101.56 million - wii
78.2 million (as of 2 years ago) - xbox 360
80 million (as of 2 years ago) - ps3
53.07 million - 3ds
81.51 million - gba

those are just the numbers for consoles i remember being popular, on steam, 10 million currently logged in with 3 million actively in games right now.

steam spy puts counter strike global offensive at
15,808,822 - 16,002,778
and just played in the last two weeks is
7,119,304 - 7,251,970

not to mention games like GTA, specifically gta5
GTA 5 shifts 52 million units

yea, gaming is a niche all right.

 

[photonboy]

Oculus Rift (comparison):
The developers of the Oculus Rift are well aware of the things that need to be done for the perfect visual experience.

That's why 90Hz (90FPS) is what they're focusing on among other specs because too low a refresh rate will cause severe nausea though it varies by the person and game.

There's going to be a lot of "me too" HUD's coming out in the near future which unfortunately like the one above can fall short. Sure the Oculus Rift is likely to be expensive but then it would be a bigger waste of money to buy something cheaper that you can't end up using.

 

[safcmanfr]

Eye tracking will be needed in order to have such a high FoV and be able to maintain decent FPS.

Look straight on, and the peripheral vision parts of the FoV (extreme left and right) done have to be fully rendered, look to the right and the left part gets more blurry etc

 

[jaber2]

Porn VR/AR is the answer we are all looking for

 

[jaber2]

Porn VR/AR is the answer we are all looking for

 

[kcarbotte]

Oculus Rift (comparison):
The developers of the Oculus Rift are well aware of the things that need to be done for the perfect visual experience.

That's why 90Hz (90FPS) is what they're focusing on among other specs because too low a refresh rate will cause severe nausea though it varies by the person and game.

There's going to be a lot of "me too" HUD's coming out in the near future which unfortunately like the one above can fall short. Sure the Oculus Rift is likely to be expensive but then it would be a bigger waste of money to buy something cheaper that you can't end up using.

This isn't a me-too HMD, and it isn't going to be cheaper than Oculus.
The company is not interested in rushing it out. 1440p panels at that size are not available with 90hz and up refresh rates yet. These are internal prototypes being shown as a glimpse of what's to come, but the company is fully aware that the tech isn't realy for primetime.

I'd hardly call that falling short.

Eye tracking will be needed in order to have such a high FoV and be able to maintain decent FPS.

Look straight on, and the peripheral vision parts of the FoV (extreme left and right) done have to be fully rendered, look to the right and the left part gets more blurry etc

StarVR will support Tobiitech eye-tracking when it comes to market.