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Comment by ghostfish | Hacker News Reader

This sounds really interesting, but there's a distinct lack of specifications, especially when this is targeted at the developer/early adopter community. How high is "high resolution"? Some display glasses companies (Vuzix) consider 852x480 high resolution, which differs greatly from what I'd consider an acceptable resolution for anything but old/SD TV shows. More details are needed.

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Carmack answered this in a comment:

The display is a single 1280x800 panel; each eye only sees a 640x800 image stretched across the huge field of view. The perceived resolution is therefore much lower than even previous generation consumer HMDs. If you are looking for high resolution, this isn't for you. For immersion, the high FOV is much, much more important, though.

Those are the prototype specs, mind.

Ouch.. that kind of torpedoed any interest I had in this thing. I'll stand back and let everyone else take the jump :)

Don't worry, Palmer Luckey has already stated that higher resolution is a top priority for the next version, and it's definitely achievable. The small high-resolution and low-latency display panels necessary are just starting to become more available. The race for retina displays in phones is helping a lot there.

I think the key difference is FOV not resolution on this which will basically put you in there, albeit not as sharp as you'd like.

There was a good point on one of the boards that HD will be hard to achieve on regular hardware just because you'd need to render at a minimum 60fps for each eye, and at 1080p few recent games will render at a smooth 120fps which this implies :) Maybe using 2 graphics cards?

I have used high and low-res VR and stereoscopic devices. It's not really that bad using a low-res one, latency is a much bigger factor. High latency causes motion sickness and overall crappy response/experience. That said, 1280x800 is actually pretty decent, and allows for high frame rates (try rendering even 1080p in stereoscopic mode at 60 fps -- not an easy feat.

That's actually the size of the panel. The resolution for each eye is half that, so 640x800 per eye. From the pictures I've seen to try and emulate it by printing a game render on paper and holding it a few cm away it looks pretty good :)

Thanks for the info. So it's about the same resolution as the current generation of existing video headsets, but with a much wider field of view.

In this demonstration he mentions it's 1200x800 http://www.youtube.com/watch?feature=player_embedded&v=v...

Not exactly high resolution (considering the wide FOV), but not bad either

Seems like an oversight that they've left out the specs

The specs are listed on the Kickstarter page now.

  Technical specs of the Dev Kit (subject to change)
  Head tracking: 6 degrees of freedom (DOF) ultra low latency
  Field of view: 110 degrees diagonal / 90 degrees horizontal
  Resolution: 1280x800 (640x800 per eye)
  Inputs: DVI/HDMI and USB
  Platforms: PC and mobile
  Weight: ~0.22 kilograms

Yea, it's light on the specs, but I feel it's a leap of faith that's reasonable to make when you have John Carmack, CliffyB, and Gabe Newell telling you to jump.

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