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Comment by tmalsburg2 | Hacker News Reader

4K is not much if you consider that these pixels have to cover the entire field of view, not just a relatively small screen.

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It’s certainly a generational jump from the Quest series at least. Of course the price is completely ridiculous

The best an eye can discern is roughly 20 microns, but generally far higher at 100 microns. They said 7.5 microns per pixel (X3 for RGB is 22.5 so roughly there without space).

Assuming they're square. Roughly calculating (23 million pixels between the two with no space between 7.5 microns,) that's 25.432mm^2. they've said they're the size of postage stamps. This ties in.

I think it's near safe to assume there's no real gap between pixels and thus indiscernible. The lag might be a thing and focus, but this might actually not be a problem.

> The best an eye can discern is roughly 20 microns

The size of an object doesn't matter. What matters is how it gets projected onto the back of your eyes.

There are 120 million rods (black and white) and 6 million cones (color) in a single eye. You would need at least as many pixels. But photoreceptors are not evenly distributed, so to account for moving your eyes across the screen, you would have to have even more pixels.

What if the would move the screens? E.g. Similar like they have in camera optical stabilization they slightly move the sensor array. They could make screen with not uniform pixel density but more dense in center and then do eye tracking and shift those screen mechanically depending where eye will be focused. Probably not easy to pull off as camera optical stabilization (need bigger movements and screens more heavy than weight of camera sensor) but maybe not completely impossible? Oled screens are very tiny and flexible just probsbly hard to make it non fragile.

The pixels may be 7.5 microns but you’re forgetting that they are viewed through a lens. The point stands: 4K pixels for the full field of view, which is a lower density than 4K for a small screen.

The lens can be directional focusing your vision onto a certain point, also your peripheral vision cannot discern as much detail. They've stated it is on a chip the size of a postage stamp. So we'll have to see how the lens directs it, when it's released.

Edit:sort of a Magic Leap type thing. The further out you look from the centre of the lense, the more the lense curves back to the focus your eye on the centre. With the eye tracking changing the image to compensate for your eye movement.

Unless they're magically changing the shape of the lens in response to eye movement that doesn't seem physically possible.

What if they shift screens mechanically in response to eye movement? Similar like apple camera optical stabilization works by shifting slightly camera sensor array? And if the screen pixel density is not uniform but more dense in the center? Hard to pull off but I guess not impossible.

Even if that where possible, I doubt that the accuracy of the eye-tracker is sufficiently high for this approach to work.

>The best an eye can discern is roughly 20 microns

That's not how it works. You need an angular resolution.

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