VR 2.0/1.5
The “horse blinders” is a feeling in VR where your peripheral vision is hindered or blocked. Play a game like Robo Recall and you are sometimes surprised by a robot standing next to you holding a gun to your head shooting. Startling b/c it was just out of view. Thats specific example is not why we need to solve horse blinders, I think it hinders immersion as we heavily rely on peripheral vision for information around us. It give us comfort to see more around, by contrast in horror movies when the camera is tight on a character we are nervous b/c we can’t see.
Why not just have wider screens? That will be a solution but its not the solution for the next few years for one, graphics cards demands when rendering 90fps+ at almost 4k. Developers are struggling to keep 90fps with even a modest allotment of bells and whistles in modern game engines.
If we can’t increase resolution in headsets what can we do? What can 2.0 (or 1.5 even) be?
If you had terrible eye sight, you’d wear glasses. If you tried to turn your eyes to extreme angles and look past the glasses you couldn’t see. The corrective lenses stop where the glasses end. We’ve be ok with that fact for hundreds of years, but how does it relate to VR?
Here’s the world if you could “see it all” with your normal vision. (forgive the random time, while middle of working in progress, I decided to grab the image from my game.)
That’s an illustration of us seeing as we do in the real world, with a wide field of view. But that’s not how it feels in VR. It feels more like this.
We can see and it’s exciting and I love it. But like I said before I also get a surprise shot in the head from time to time, and feel a sense of claustrophobic even in wide open spaces.
We can’t render more, or can we? What if we added 2 extra screens for purely the peripheral?
I’m not trying to hardware design, but roughly it goes here. When I went to the Exploratorium I learned how little you can actually see out of your peripheral vision. So why not make that a literal translation?
Don’t request a large pull for resources, something similar to a “render to texture” which, yes can be expensive, but we’re trying to make VR2.0. Can we pull a little more? Yes. But games would need to be optimized for it. I’m sure someone already thought of this, as I don’t feel its too innovative. But what I’m suggesting is keeping a thick boarder of “glasses”.
Let them stay big and bold. That will help the user continue to look with their head. Outside of VR you look more with your eyes, inside of VR you learn to move your head to see things out of the best part of the lenses the center.
It will give the illusion of more awareness which is what we really need from peripheral vision anyway. I need to know if there is extra movement, or a flash of something that triggers my head to turn. It doesn’t need to be much, maybe even start 16x16 large/soft pixels?
It reminds me of, or maybe could be as simple as the of the LED Home Theater Accent Kits you can buy or maybe come with some TV’s. Its increases immersion at an arguably super low resolution.
While I believe VR 3.0 might be wrap around screens with foveated rendering, the issue with that right now is screen costs. We can’t ignore the need for economical solutions for the near future. Additionally stabilizing the market for developers. Changing screens will have a ripple effect in the industry that is trying to set standards. Hardware changes = software changes = developers change their specs and optimizations = fractured or further fracturing the marketplace. Seems like a bad more for the next 1-2 years.
I’m proposing adding 2 screens that users can have and can be optionally supported or not have and still enjoy the experience on essentially the same platform. If you have them, great it increases immersion, maybe the min specs for that are a little higher, but it can keep us on the same platform and move us forward.
Baby steps right now, because we just completed making a number of very large leaps.
References of Similar ideas
Sparse Peripheral Displays: http://www.theverge.com/2016/4/26/11512820/sparselight-ar-vr-led-hack-microsoft-hololens
Expanding the Peripheral View of Oculus Rift: http://www.instructables.com/id/Expanding-the-Peripheral-View-of-Oculus-Rift/