6 ms·

Following my habit for evaluating VR-infrastructure projects: Ctrl+F, "latency". No mention of what the latency is. There's a big difference between how Google

Following my habit for evaluating VR-infrastructure projects: Ctrl+F, "latency". No mention of what the latency is. There's a big difference between how Google and Oculus approach VR. Oculus' position is that it's bad to show people VR experiences that are likely to make them sick; they refer to it as "poisoning the well". They're very cautious in how they label things, and they've invested a lot of effort and talked a lot publicly about how to get things exactly right. Google's approach is, instead, to keep expectations down; they call it "cardboard". And, well, what's going on in the Cardboard world kind of freaks me out, because Cardboard's documentation never seems to mention the problems, Google never talks about the work that needs to be done or the problems Cardboard has, they just sort of pretend that VR is VR is VR. It's like they're really trying to poison the well (though I don't think they'd actually do that intentionally).

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- falsedan 11y ago
  > The latency here will be the refresh rate of the display that's running the code For VR, latency is delay between head movement and viewpoint movement, which is more than just display refresh rate.
  - devsquid 11y ago
    Sort of, the viewport can't change more than the displays refresh rate. So the refresh rate is a hard cap on the latency between head movements and the view moving. This is probably why we are begining to hear talks about 120hz smart phone screen, since this would drastically improve them. I believe most high end VR helms have 75hz screens.
    - wlesieutre 11y ago
      Oculus Rift and HTC Vive are both at 90 hz.
- jimrandomh 11y ago
  In the context of VR, latency refers to the amount of time between when your head rotates and when the light coming out of the display reflects that rotation ("motion-to-photon"). Too much latency means that whenever you rotate your head, the world you're looking at seems to shake. Wearing a headset with high latency conditions people to hold their head still (they get negative reinforcement from looking around, but don't realize what's happening).
moron4hire 11y ago
"Poisoning the well" presumes users can't tell the difference between a cardboard box and purpose built hardware. I know it's fun to laugh at "lusers", but people really aren't that dumb and deserve to be treated with a little bit more respect than that.
- seanwilson 11y ago
  I agree with this. Every product category in existence has a range of good and bad versions. I think people are smart enough to not lump all VR experiences together just like watching a bad movie or eating a bad pizza doesn't put you off them for life. Also, you can't stop people releasing whatever VR products they want so even if poisoning the well was real you can't do anything about it.
nzff 11y ago
Hi there, author here. Cardboard's motion-to-photon latency is significantly worse than the GearVR. This Swift hack is worse than Cardboard. This is true for a number of both software and hardware reasons. Of course, comparing Cardboard to the Vive and Rift is hardly to apples-to-apples. Your concerns re: poisoning the well are valid. This seems to be a common divide among people working in VR: should we be making low quality (whatever that means) experiences? For example, VR devs often remark that 360 video content isn't "true VR." I don't know that I agree. Purely as a matter of opinion, I don't see a reason not to experiment in VR, even if it's far from perfect. It's-not-VR complaints strike me a little bit like the "no true Scotsman" logical fallacy. It's great that Oculus and Google have different approaches to the problem, and, as I'm sure you can guess, I don't believe there's a real risk of poisoning the well. Then again, like Dennis Miller used to say: that's just my opinion, I could be wrong. (In which case we'll all have to wait another 15+ years for another turn on the carousel.) :)
devsquid 11y ago
Cardboard has very low latency. I believe its far lower than the Oculus is. Its of course not doing very much. But thats the point its simple entry level VR for the masses. Most people aren't going to spend 400$ for the headset + 2000$ for the computer to get an Occulus working. They might after they see the wonders of carboard however. I think they are doing the exact opposite of "poisoning the well", they are letting a whole demographic of people that would never experience VR get a chance to see whats its all about.

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falsedan 11y ago
> The latency here will be the refresh rate of the display that's running the code For VR, latency is delay between head movement and viewpoint movement, which is more than just display refresh rate.
- devsquid 11y ago
  Sort of, the viewport can't change more than the displays refresh rate. So the refresh rate is a hard cap on the latency between head movements and the view moving. This is probably why we are begining to hear talks about 120hz smart phone screen, since this would drastically improve them. I believe most high end VR helms have 75hz screens.
  - wlesieutre 11y ago
    Oculus Rift and HTC Vive are both at 90 hz.
jimrandomh 11y ago
In the context of VR, latency refers to the amount of time between when your head rotates and when the light coming out of the display reflects that rotation ("motion-to-photon"). Too much latency means that whenever you rotate your head, the world you're looking at seems to shake. Wearing a headset with high latency conditions people to hold their head still (they get negative reinforcement from looking around, but don't realize what's happening).

moron4hire 11y ago

"Poisoning the well" presumes users can't tell the difference between a cardboard box and purpose built hardware. I know it's fun to laugh at "lusers", but people really aren't that dumb and deserve to be treated with a little bit more respect than that.

seanwilson 11y ago
I agree with this. Every product category in existence has a range of good and bad versions. I think people are smart enough to not lump all VR experiences together just like watching a bad movie or eating a bad pizza doesn't put you off them for life. Also, you can't stop people releasing whatever VR products they want so even if poisoning the well was real you can't do anything about it.

nzff 11y ago

Hi there, author here. Cardboard's motion-to-photon latency is significantly worse than the GearVR. This Swift hack is worse than Cardboard. This is true for a number of both software and hardware reasons. Of course, comparing Cardboard to the Vive and Rift is hardly to apples-to-apples. Your concerns re: poisoning the well are valid. This seems to be a common divide among people working in VR: should we be making low quality (whatever that means) experiences? For example, VR devs often remark that 360 video content isn't "true VR." I don't know that I agree. Purely as a matter of opinion, I don't see a reason not to experiment in VR, even if it's far from perfect. It's-not-VR complaints strike me a little bit like the "no true Scotsman" logical fallacy. It's great that Oculus and Google have different approaches to the problem, and, as I'm sure you can guess, I don't believe there's a real risk of poisoning the well. Then again, like Dennis Miller used to say: that's just my opinion, I could be wrong. (In which case we'll all have to wait another 15+ years for another turn on the carousel.) :)

devsquid 11y ago

Cardboard has very low latency. I believe its far lower than the Oculus is. Its of course not doing very much. But thats the point its simple entry level VR for the masses. Most people aren't going to spend 400$ for the headset + 2000$ for the computer to get an Occulus working. They might after they see the wonders of carboard however. I think they are doing the exact opposite of "poisoning the well", they are letting a whole demographic of people that would never experience VR get a chance to see whats its all about.