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Comment by tootie | Hacker News Reader

I got to play with a dev kit IRL and they are super impressive up close. The images have real depth and the development environment is standard Unity with just an HDMI out to the display. That being said, the usable field of view is not 180, it's narrower than that. And after building a few nifty demos, we put it on a shelf and never figured out a way to make it useful or interesting.

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You should let a local hacklab borrow it, might as well get people experimenting with it instead of collecting dust :)

Wasn't mine to loan unfortunately and I'm no longer working there. I sadly think it may have ended up in the trash.

I played with the great grandfather of this device — a black & white ~4” LCD, the size of a pizza box, attached to a 286 luggable. It was cool … but the killer feature is being able to rotate the data — our eyes are still 2D.

Turns out, I can rotate data on a regular old monitor.

If there was a version with 180° FOV, on a table, it’d be a great gaming table, but the market is … niche?

Pedantic correction: our eyes are not "2d", depth perception is a thing. That's why VR hardware is still years/decades away from replicating the real thing. More info: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Depth_perception

What are we missing? I thought VR hardware specifically took advantage of binocular vision so that it gave depth perception.

The biggest component that VR doesn't have is a way of simulating focal distances. Current VR headsets focus at a fixed distance of about 2 meters, which makes reading and examining close objects difficult and causes distant ones to appear flat and unreal. The world lacks part of what lets us see depth. Facebook has very impressive prototypes that solve this [0], but so far they've been unwilling or unable to manufacture them at scale.

VR headsets are also severely lacking in brightness and color depth compared to reality or even modern TVs, and they could always use more angular resolution, wider viewing angles, and higher refresh rates.

[0] https://uploadvr.com/half-dome-3-prime-time/

>> Current VR headsets focus at a fixed distance of about 2 meters, which...

Is no different than the vision problems most people over 50 have. In fact, I dont need my progressive lenses to read up close in VR.

Are variable focal length eyeballs part of experiencing the 3d world? Yes. Can we live without it? Yes, and you will too some day.

I'm not sure how this is adding anything to the conversation. My grandmother cannot tell the difference between SD and HDTV, let alone 4K/UHD, yet the difference is quite drastic to me and a higher resolution is certainly more realistic and immersive. Maintaining a visual experience that is as close to reality as possible is what sells the illusion. That's great that the bar is lower for you I guess, but not really helpful for literally the majority of the world.

There are a lot of optics nerds in the world who will insist that the current state of VR is Broken Beyond Redemption because of their pet vision feature they learned about in intro to biology. It's not. Yes, it's not perfect, but it's still better than a 2D screen.

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