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Comment by ekianjo | Hacker News Reader

Meh, all the previous headsets from Sony in recent history were really, really crappy (I tried most of them in exhibitions). Small angle of vision (making it look like you play a game through a small window), unbalanced weight (you tend to have you head looking down after a while), I really hope they are getting their act together here if they want to compete. Occulus Rift has a lot of headstart in that field.

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The display is LCD so will be interesting to see how they do on persistence, but the FOV is 90 degrees horizontal - about the same as Oculus' units. Full PR here: http://www.prnewswire.com/news-releases/sony-computer-entert... (confirmation that this is horizontal FOV in the Japanese PR: http://www.scei.co.jp/corporate/release/140319.html )

From the presentation (see: http://live.theverge.com/live-sony-playstation-future-of-inn... ) it looks like 1) they've been working seriously on this for over 3 years and 2) they have taken the ideas of immersion/presence to heart and are focused on VR as a medium, not as a gimmick.

Personally, I think it'll be good for Oculus and VR in general to have a strong competitor w/ Sony. If it weren't PS4 only, I'd seriously consider grabbing one. Of course, we'll have to see what Oculus has up their sleeves w/ DK2 tomorrow...

Oculus Rift FOV is 110°.

DK1 is ~110° diagonal, 90° horizontal, roughly equivalent (and varies a fair amount w/ the lenses you use).

For comparison, the HMZs OP references are a HFOV of about 45°.

The field of view on the first Rift Development Kit is difficult to quantify because it varies depending on the eye relief from the lens to the specific user's eye. This is part of why there is a visual calibration procedure for the kit.

In any case, the field of view on that hardware is generally lens limited and the lenses are round, so the monocular field of view for most users is circular. The diagonal field of view is then equal to the vertical and horizontal field of view.

Not quite: for each eye, the screen aspect ratio is 8:9--not perfectly square and you can see in oculus videos on youtube that the distortion shader uses a scaling factor to make the screen just touch the left and right edges, but the top and bottom get somewhat cropped.

The diagonal is a bigger FOV than the horizontal FOV simply for that reason.

Most people can't see the edges of the screen when looking directly at them in the rift (but they can when looking indirectly, it is something to do with the eyeball moving around leaving the sweet spot).

Is there public data/or a spreadsheet/simulator for eye/relief:fov (I assume data for the A-C cups aren't relevant anymore) and accounting for binocular overlap?

Also is there technical documentation on the prewarp shader and pixel density/perceived resolution? I'm interested particularly in text rendering, so really looking forward to the low persistence displays!

The best practices guide covers the design side of angular resolution and binocular overlap: http://static.oculusvr.com/sdk-downloads/documents/OculusBes...

There are technical details on distortion correction in the SDK guide: http://static.oculusvr.com/sdk-downloads/documents/Oculus_SD...

Much of this is in flux as we improve on both the methods and the specific implementations, but the guides will be updated as we get there.

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