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Comment by IshKebab | Hacker News Reader

I'm a bit skeptical of how much of a problem this really is. I have never noticed it in VR. Perhaps because:

1. Display resolution is still quite low, so really everything is blurry.

2. You will never be able to notice blurriness where you aren't focused anyway because you aren't looking there! Everything is always blurry in your peripheral vision.

3. Surely eye focus is a feedback system, like in cameras? I mean nobody has problems focusing on TVs because your eyes just magically change focal length until the image is sharp.

I am stereoblind so maybe it is a big problem for others.

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Have you tried to focus on something that is under 1 foot from your eyes in VR? From my experience it is virtually impossible, and I think the cause is related to this problem (not 100% sure though).

I think for very close objects you need to have a very good match between your interpupillary distance, the interaxial distance of the HMD lenses and the interaxial distance of the virtual cameras.

Also it depends on the HMD screen size, at some point parts of the object's image for each eye falls off screen.

Try closing one eye to rule out bad alignment of the viewing frustrums to your eyes' actual viewing positions and angles.

I might be an outlier, in that I don't experience motion sickness / vestibular mismatch from VR, but I suffer from this focal issue pretty severely.

When I'm in VR, I notice it slightly, but it's easy to get used to. However, as soon as I get out, I find it very difficult to focus normally again, usually for about 4x the amount of time I was in. This can make it difficult to do anything that benefits from depth perception, such as driving, walking on uneven terrain, etc.

If this technique can improve that side effect, it would make quite a difference for me personally. No one else I've talked to about VR have this same experience, so it might only affect a subset of the population.

There's an article about this here: https://developer.oculus.com/design/latest/concepts/bp_app_i...

I was reading it specifically in the context of problems with displaying text in VR.

Paraphrasing: in real life, your body uses two inputs to intuit distance: your eyes' focal distance and your eyes' relative angle. Focal distance is fixed inside the headset, so your body loses one of its depth cues. I suspect that contributes to the overall sense that seeing things in VR can get tiring unusually quickly.

Rather than nausea, I think I've noticed inability to focus on items away from the centre of vision (haven't used VR equipment in about 6 months, might be remembering things wrong), that's what this sounds more like it will address.

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