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Comment by dylan604 | Hacker News Reader

that's like asking if a tree falls in a forest kind of question.

in the real world, no not everything is in focus all of the time. i'm currently sitting 38" away from the wall, my monitor is 8" from the wall. If I'm focused on the monitor, the objects hanging on the wall are not in focus.

From a snobbish videographer's point of view, it sounds like you're living in an ENG world vs a cinematic one.

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> in the real world, no not everything is in focus all of the time. i'm currently sitting 38" away from the wall, my monitor is 8" from the wall. If I'm focused on the monitor, the objects hanging on the wall are not in focus.

But that is also the case in VR so I’m not sure why one would consider “everything to be in focus” which is what my question is getting at (why do people say that). If I focus on something in VR the objects behind it will also go out of focus. Unlike in cinema where a camera has to choose what is in focus, in VR our eyes choose what to focus on just like in the real world.

That's just not how I perceive imagery shot in a flat field vs shallow depth. I've spent quite a bit of time in a VR headset with live action content. It always just feels off, even the content we acquired in 3D. The 3D helps, but it's still just off. At the time I stopped working in that field, people were just starting to talk about foveal type views. However, I think they were mainly worried about what part of the screen to render in full detail to lower the rendering requirements. It sounds like with Apple's eye tracking cameras, they might actually be closer to telling at what depth you are attempting to focus.

There's no released VR system that has more than one focal depth, so I'm not sure what you're talking about, here. Whether you're looking at something near or far away in VR, your eyes don't change accommodation (focus), but they may change vergence (difference in direction between eyes). So everything is always in focus. It's easy enough to observe - look at a near object in VR and then, without moving your eyes, concentrate on a far object and note that you can still see the detail clearly.

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