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Comment by slg | Hacker News Reader

It is a little disappointing they were unable to fix the field of view issue in the shipping units. That was the biggest limiting factor between the type of amazing demos Microsoft has shown and my personal experience with the device at last years Build. Maybe that will be something that is eventually fixed before a consumer release, but until it is this device is more of a glimpse into an exciting future rather than a game-changer.

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I read somewhere that with the technique they're using for the displays, it's very difficult to get a wider fov, and it's continually been a sore point for Hololens.

Despite this, I still think Microsoft is lightyears ahead of the market in the AR space due to the work and research that's gone into Hololens all the way down the stack. They've already made custom silicon to hit their sensor fusion -> display latency requirements and they're making W10 for AR.

I read somewhere else that some of the FOV tuning/shrinking has been for safety concerns as well. Given the "truly untethered" experience, I can certainly understand if Microsoft is trying to err on the side of caution versus accidentally blocking some of the important sideband navigation information people get from peripheral vision, while they wait for more science and research to be done on such things.

> I read somewhere else that some of the FOV tuning/shrinking has been for safety concerns as well.

This is very wishful thinking on the part of wherever you read that. Microsoft would love to expand the FOV, it's literlaly the number one bit of feedback they get on the product, but the current optics design simply won't allow it.

it's very difficult to get a wider fov

It's essentially impossible with the approach that all of the public AR HMD's are using. Not only that, this approach does not allow for accommodation which is arguably one of the most important things needed for convincing HMD AR.

Could someone ELI5 why FOV is such a difficult problem to solve?

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