Hacker News Reader

Comment by neogenix | Hacker News Reader

This, and the fact that you cannot focus into the distance. In real life most of your view is blurred except the part you are focussing on. In VR it still just looks flat, because if you focus on something in the distance, nothing happens.

View on HN

I'm watching developments with light field displays for this with interest.

That said, you don't really notice this effect, or much else, once you're immersed in something. I've hundreds of hours in the vive and I still punch walls, the ceiling, lean on objects that don't exist.

The point is that regardless of the various things that would make it better (4k light field displays, bigger fov, higher refresh, blacker blacks, etc etc) the tech is good enough today - the fact that one is able to surrogate away from "I am stood in my living room wearing some silly goggles" to "I am stood in the snow atop a peak watching the sun set, I should get inside or I'll get cold" is the litmus test. Literally everyone I've jammed in it, young and old, has lost themselves in it.

I'm really curious if this is based on your actual experience with a Vive or if this is an assumption based on what you know about the technology.

I read an article at some point that claimed this was an issue so I consciously tested it in the unit - focusing on something near my face and then farther away without moving my head and it actually feels (to me) pretty correct.

I don't really know the science behind this versus light field displays or whatever, but if you have access to a unit I encourage you to try it - it's very difficult to detect issues with focus and it absolutely does not look flat (again, to me).

I would be very interested of all the opinions in this thread which of them are from people who own a unit and have tried these things and which are assumptions.

This technology is so incredibly convincing I'm embarrassed to say that I fell over trying to lean on a virtual pool table at one point. I simply forgot that it wasn't a real thing. :)

There's no focus in any VR headset currently. So whatever you experienced was not that. You might be thinking of the stereo convergence, where the left and right images come together where you look at them. But they don't have any capability to adjust to the focus of your eyes right now.

I wonder what happens if one uses VR goggles for too long. Will one lose the ability to focus?

If you wear prisms that invert the world, your brain will eventually see the world inverted when you remove the prisms, and this effect will auto-correct after some duration.

It also gives you one hell of a migraine.

Things might work differently for small children who wear VR goggles for extended durations. Their brains might get wired the wrong way, and there might be no "auto-correct" in this case.

I have a PHD in small children vision, I concur.

why would an adult who grew up with normal vision be able to adjust to something else but not the opposite?

Adjusting to the inability to focus is different from learning to focus. Like the jellyfish who can't orient themselves properly if they were born in zero gravity [1].

http://www.businessinsider.com/space-born-animals-adjust-to-...

I don't think it would be catastrophic, unless these children spend 90% of their time playing VR games. I would expect it to be similar to exposing a child to a second language. If you replace their exposure to the previous language completely with the new one, their proficiency at the first one will suffer but if you provide enough time for both, the brain will improve in both.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com