8 ms·

> This is an intriguing idea It is an obvious idea. AR/VR is hard. Dumb displays are not. I think we should have had similar products a decade ago, and if I'm

> This is an intriguing idea It is an obvious idea. AR/VR is hard. Dumb displays are not. I think we should have had similar products a decade ago, and if I'm not mistaken, these exist in cheaper SD versions from noname manufacturers. That said, I want this, and not Meta's thing or whatever Apple is cooking up, because I knew ahead of time that no one is going to get the VR part right initially. They are barking up the wrong tree, because as far as I know, no developer is paying attention to proprioception. From what I can tell, they're focused on the eyes only, and proprioception is essential for VR. AR is different, maybe they're getting that right. I'm just not interested in AR. It's great for a futuristic technology in a film, but in practice, it seems silly to me. But I don't know everything, hardly anything, really. What is the metric called that is the distance to where the display appears to be? It is not focal length, and I need really a word for what that is called. If the display appears to be, say, 10' away, I probably don't want it. It would be awesome if this apparent distance was adjustable. I am near sighted, hate contacts and correctable lenses cause me migraine. Thus, I prefer to view displays quite close, no more than 2', or to appear no more than 2' away when it is actually much closer to the eye and using a magnifying lens. Pads have worked well for me for consuming media because I can hold at the right (close) distance for comfort. Really hope I get what I want, have wanted it for about 25 years and been confused why HMDs had only mostly been used for military purposes, for insane prices. It is about time someone has ignored the difficult to get right AR/VR tech, and just gave us a high quality, personal, wearable display.

kfarr 4y ago
Yeah these have been around for almost a decade as cheap VR knockoffs for the unsuspecting, albeit I haven't seen the direct USB c output option before. Not until you take it home and turn it on do you realize the resolution of 1080p strapped to your eyes is a pixelated mess and the lack of even basic 3DOF makes these things uncomfortable for most people.
- Maursault 4y ago
  > Not until you take it home and turn it on do you realize the resolution of 1080p strapped to your eyes is a pixelated mess Well, that sucks. Thanks for the clue to never purchase without a personal demonstration. I figured SD would be like that, but really hoped that 1080p would be satisfactory. But doesn't this depend on pixel density? If the displays approach the pixel density of displays of high end smartphones, I'd probably be satisfied with that. Even though those pixels can be seen (at 10x magnification), at high enough pixel density, pixels can be ignored when focusing on the video content. I used to sit really close to CRT televisions, which have huge pixels, so there is bound to be some improvement from the way it was in the dark ages.
  - extrapickles 4y ago
    The Valve Index does 1440×1600 per eye and it probably needs to be at least double that before artifacts become hard to notice.
    - Maursault 4y ago
      I am starting to see resolution doesn't matter. According to the specs, Valve Index has a very low average pixel density of about 13-15ppi. Criminal. Compare that to the high end iPhone display's pixel density of 128ppi. So if we could have ocular displays around 100ppi @720p, that would look a lot better than that of Valve Index displays at its seemingly impressive 1440x1600.
      - rowanG077 4y ago
        Valve index has a PPI of 598. What I assume you are talking about is PPD, or Pixel per Degree. Iphone doesn't have a fixed PPD since the distance to your eyes is not fixed. An ocular 720p display at 100ppd would be be about an inch diagonally at 10cm from you eye balls. That's basically unuseable
      - michaelmrose 4y ago
        Firstly a definition PPI: pixels in a single dimension / size in that dimension in inches. A nice high end phones screen is like 300 PPI a 20 year old laptop screen is around 100. A nice desktop monitor is 160-240. A calculator https://www.sven.de/dpi/ https://www.sven.de/dpi/ It's hard to discuss a monitor being 100ppi@720p because those 2 variables are related via a third variable size. A 720p screen would be 100dpi at about 14" and indeed that is a common size for crappy laptops. A tiny screen with that PPI strapped to your face would look like shit. For instance a 2" square screen would be 200px x 200px. Resolution matters a lot.
      - numpad0 4y ago
        A 20/20 or 1.0 visual acuity equals 1MOA(1/60deg). A 20/20 equivalent 360 degrees panorama image is has a size of 21600x10800px minimum. For a VR headset with 120x120 degrees H/VFOV(178deg diagonally), you need a 7200x7200px panel. 2 x 7200px x 7200px x 24bpp x 144Hz = 360Gbps, or worth 4x 100GE LAG’d, or one PCIe 4.0 x23 link, or one DDR5 channel. That’s a bit hard to put onto a face cheaply…
toast0 4y ago
> It is an obvious idea. AR/VR is hard. Dumb displays are not. I think we should have had similar products a decade ago, and if I'm not mistaken, these exist in cheaper SD versions from noname manufacturers. These products have existed for decades. I can't find the one I remember seeing ads for during the 2000s, but Sony had one in 2011 called the HMZ-T1, they had a much earlier model called the Visortron. I think the widely advertised ones were maybe iTV goggles, but I can't find any history on them. Typically advertised as equivelent to a large screen tv farther away. If you want a demo of a real product, call around to children's dental offices. Many of them have (or have had) these to help distract kids during exams and procedures, although mounting a tv above the exam chair is also popular (a lot easier with a lightweight lcd or oled than a crt or plasma)
- Someone 4y ago
  Wikipedia (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Glasstron https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Glasstron) says the lineage is Visortron (????), Glasstron (1996), HMZ-T1 and HMZ-T2 (2011), HMZ-T3 (????, maybe also 2911) https://www.digitiser2000.com/main-page/the-first-playstation-vr-headset-was-made-for-perverts https://www.digitiser2000.com/main-page/the-first-playstatio... claims the Visortron was never released commercially.
- 13of40 4y ago
  I had a Sony Glasstron in 1999 that was basically the same idea but TV-resolution instead of 1080p. It was fine for playing games and watching movies. A little bit alienating to anyone else in the room, though.
- NonNefarious 4y ago
  There is already a current product that is essentially this: https://moverio.epson.com https://moverio.epson.com I bought a pair for experimentation as a viewfinder (about $1000). They proved the potential of that application, but suffered from some fit-adjustability issues and too small of an image. They could have been very good, however.
moron4hire 4y ago
> no developer is paying attention to proprioception That is not true at all. Proprioception is top of mind for every serious VR developer. Outside of poor software performance, it's the #1 cause of simulator sickness. Short of hacking the vestibular system, there's nothing we can do about the lack of virtual acceleration cues. So we design within the constraints we have. It's why you see teleport locomotion. It's why developers get into such arguments over "smooth movement" with gamers who think they know better. Lack of proprioception with virtual movement is a huge problem that we would love to solve, but laypeople have an irrational fear of a little extra electricity getting piped through their ears, so I doubt we're going to see much change there. Fixed-view, wearable displays violate proprioception even more than VR HMDs, because they don't even give you the real acceleration cues you get from actually moving your head. As for your question about distance, I suspect you're looking for "accommodation". Accommodation is the physical distortion of the eye to change the focal distance of the lens. Combined with vergence (the distance at which our binocular vision rays converge), the two systems work together to give you a sense of how far away something is (among other things, like atmospheric hazing, parallax, and trained memory of similar objects). Most modern VR systems lack the ability to account for accommodation, leading to what is called "vergence-accommodation conflict". It can be a source of eye-strain for some people, but it tends to be adaptable over time. Note that I said "most" modern VR systems. It's an active area of hardware research, as the solutions--light field displays and varifocal lenses--are large, complex, and therefore expensive. The latest developments in "pancake" optics, where focal distance for the lens is folded in on itself via a clever system of internal reflectance, has a possibility of bringing the size down, but unfortunately not the complexity or cost. So again, it's really not fair to say developers are "ignoring" these problems. We are all extremely aware of the them. There are just some things you can't do anything about without a major breakthrough.
- Abishek_Muthian 4y ago
  > Fixed-view, wearable displays violate proprioception even more than VR HMDs, because they don't even give you the real acceleration cues you get from actually moving your head. This is unfortunate, I have severe motion sickness; Can't even play Minecraft or any FPS. So VR headsets are out of question. I was waiting for display glasses like Lenovo's T1 for years now[1] due to its accessibility benefits. From what you say, It seems like I would be sick if I use display glasses too until the proprioception issues are resolved and I'm glad that it's being seriously researched. [1] https://needgap.com/problems/16-wearable-low-latency-display-for-computers-display-wearables https://needgap.com/problems/16-wearable-low-latency-display... (Disclosure: My problem validation forum).
codeulike 4y ago
They are barking up the wrong tree, because as far as I know, no developer is paying attention to proprioception. Not sure what you mean by this. VR headsets know exactly where your hands are and can infer most of the rest of your pose from head height, they rely pretty heavily on that for the immersion.
- Maursault 4y ago
  While position tracking is important, what I was talking about was the user's sense of proprioception. Seems to me that too much attention has been given to tuning the visual response to the user turning their head or looking up and down, or turning around, and little to no attention being given to attenuating the user's sense of proprioception, to reenforcing the feeling that the virtual body parts are an integral part of the user's actual real-world body.
  - codeulike 4y ago
    Have you used any modern VR sets?
    - Maursault 4y ago
      Depends. Are you attacking my credibility with an ad hominem fallacy? Just wondering. Because if so, it is only because my argument has confounded you, and if you can't beat that, maybe you can beat me.
      - codeulike 4y ago
        But have you? Because I have and to me, within the confines of what is economically feasible (eg hand tracking but not leg tracking), they seem to spend a lot of effort on proprioception. I think in a conversation about VR it's ok to ask whether youve actually used it.
        Maursault 4y ago
        > I think in a conversation about VR it's ok to ask whether youve actually used it. I don't see how it's relevant. Nearly all VR insights came from those who never actually used it, namely because it didn't exist yet. But, in fact, I have used VR quite extensively. I do own or have owned or borrowed or used or demoed at least 50 different models over the last 25 years, and my experience over the last decade has only ever reinforced this grievance, that VR hardware developers and content producers are paying little to no attention to the user's proprioception, and nothing I have ever seen, neither in my own experience, in depth reviews, documentation, nor your own statements has led me to believe otherwise. Though the component technology is getting better all the time, the VR development is no different than it was in 1996. It's as though developers are either entirely unaware that proprioception exists, or are aware and think it will take care of itself. And though it does sometimes, accidentally, it is not every time and always, and there is no great reason why it shouldn't, other than that developers apparently either haven't discovered it, or haven't discovered how. Quid pro quo, now please give me your VR credentials so I know I'm not wasting my time. After all, once you can no longer speak to someone's argument, you think it is ok to personally attack them. So let's scrutinize your experience and knowledge in kind and see how much of an expert you really are, and maybe see if we can't get you to realize that when your ability to persuade fails, and you have no further ability to make valid argument and nothing more to offer, then you should really simply stop, leave others alone, and not try to bully or attempt to humiliate them with personal attack.
bradknowles 4y ago
There is the focal distance, which is the distance at which your eyes need to focus. I'm pretty near-sighted, so my focal distance is short. There is also the focal angle, which is the angle your eyes have to be at to focus at a particular point which is a given distance away. As we evolved over millions of years, the focal angle corresponded to the focal distance the angle would get get closer and closer to zero (where your eyes are angled parallel to each other), the further away something was. But with modern VR systems, they feed different images to each eye, and they give you different focal angles (to make things appear further away or closer together), but the focal distance doesn't change -- it's still that screen that is millimeters away from your eyeballs. So, your visual systems get all kinds of screwed up. So far as I know, this problem is not something that can be corrected with any modern VR system. AR is different, since you're layering one generated visual image with one screen that both eyeballs are looking at and that gets put on top of the actual real world image that you can see.

kfarr 4y ago

Yeah these have been around for almost a decade as cheap VR knockoffs for the unsuspecting, albeit I haven't seen the direct USB c output option before. Not until you take it home and turn it on do you realize the resolution of 1080p strapped to your eyes is a pixelated mess and the lack of even basic 3DOF makes these things uncomfortable for most people.

Maursault 4y ago
> Not until you take it home and turn it on do you realize the resolution of 1080p strapped to your eyes is a pixelated mess Well, that sucks. Thanks for the clue to never purchase without a personal demonstration. I figured SD would be like that, but really hoped that 1080p would be satisfactory. But doesn't this depend on pixel density? If the displays approach the pixel density of displays of high end smartphones, I'd probably be satisfied with that. Even though those pixels can be seen (at 10x magnification), at high enough pixel density, pixels can be ignored when focusing on the video content. I used to sit really close to CRT televisions, which have huge pixels, so there is bound to be some improvement from the way it was in the dark ages.
- extrapickles 4y ago
  The Valve Index does 1440×1600 per eye and it probably needs to be at least double that before artifacts become hard to notice.
  - Maursault 4y ago
    I am starting to see resolution doesn't matter. According to the specs, Valve Index has a very low average pixel density of about 13-15ppi. Criminal. Compare that to the high end iPhone display's pixel density of 128ppi. So if we could have ocular displays around 100ppi @720p, that would look a lot better than that of Valve Index displays at its seemingly impressive 1440x1600.
    - rowanG077 4y ago
      Valve index has a PPI of 598. What I assume you are talking about is PPD, or Pixel per Degree. Iphone doesn't have a fixed PPD since the distance to your eyes is not fixed. An ocular 720p display at 100ppd would be be about an inch diagonally at 10cm from you eye balls. That's basically unuseable
    - michaelmrose 4y ago
      Firstly a definition PPI: pixels in a single dimension / size in that dimension in inches. A nice high end phones screen is like 300 PPI a 20 year old laptop screen is around 100. A nice desktop monitor is 160-240. A calculator https://www.sven.de/dpi/ https://www.sven.de/dpi/ It's hard to discuss a monitor being 100ppi@720p because those 2 variables are related via a third variable size. A 720p screen would be 100dpi at about 14" and indeed that is a common size for crappy laptops. A tiny screen with that PPI strapped to your face would look like shit. For instance a 2" square screen would be 200px x 200px. Resolution matters a lot.
    - numpad0 4y ago
      A 20/20 or 1.0 visual acuity equals 1MOA(1/60deg). A 20/20 equivalent 360 degrees panorama image is has a size of 21600x10800px minimum. For a VR headset with 120x120 degrees H/VFOV(178deg diagonally), you need a 7200x7200px panel. 2 x 7200px x 7200px x 24bpp x 144Hz = 360Gbps, or worth 4x 100GE LAG’d, or one PCIe 4.0 x23 link, or one DDR5 channel. That’s a bit hard to put onto a face cheaply…

toast0 4y ago

> It is an obvious idea. AR/VR is hard. Dumb displays are not. I think we should have had similar products a decade ago, and if I'm not mistaken, these exist in cheaper SD versions from noname manufacturers. These products have existed for decades. I can't find the one I remember seeing ads for during the 2000s, but Sony had one in 2011 called the HMZ-T1, they had a much earlier model called the Visortron. I think the widely advertised ones were maybe iTV goggles, but I can't find any history on them. Typically advertised as equivelent to a large screen tv farther away. If you want a demo of a real product, call around to children's dental offices. Many of them have (or have had) these to help distract kids during exams and procedures, although mounting a tv above the exam chair is also popular (a lot easier with a lightweight lcd or oled than a crt or plasma)

Someone 4y ago
Wikipedia (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Glasstron https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Glasstron) says the lineage is Visortron (????), Glasstron (1996), HMZ-T1 and HMZ-T2 (2011), HMZ-T3 (????, maybe also 2911) https://www.digitiser2000.com/main-page/the-first-playstation-vr-headset-was-made-for-perverts https://www.digitiser2000.com/main-page/the-first-playstatio... claims the Visortron was never released commercially.
13of40 4y ago
I had a Sony Glasstron in 1999 that was basically the same idea but TV-resolution instead of 1080p. It was fine for playing games and watching movies. A little bit alienating to anyone else in the room, though.
NonNefarious 4y ago
There is already a current product that is essentially this: https://moverio.epson.com https://moverio.epson.com I bought a pair for experimentation as a viewfinder (about $1000). They proved the potential of that application, but suffered from some fit-adjustability issues and too small of an image. They could have been very good, however.

moron4hire 4y ago

> no developer is paying attention to proprioception That is not true at all. Proprioception is top of mind for every serious VR developer. Outside of poor software performance, it's the #1 cause of simulator sickness. Short of hacking the vestibular system, there's nothing we can do about the lack of virtual acceleration cues. So we design within the constraints we have. It's why you see teleport locomotion. It's why developers get into such arguments over "smooth movement" with gamers who think they know better. Lack of proprioception with virtual movement is a huge problem that we would love to solve, but laypeople have an irrational fear of a little extra electricity getting piped through their ears, so I doubt we're going to see much change there. Fixed-view, wearable displays violate proprioception even more than VR HMDs, because they don't even give you the real acceleration cues you get from actually moving your head. As for your question about distance, I suspect you're looking for "accommodation". Accommodation is the physical distortion of the eye to change the focal distance of the lens. Combined with vergence (the distance at which our binocular vision rays converge), the two systems work together to give you a sense of how far away something is (among other things, like atmospheric hazing, parallax, and trained memory of similar objects). Most modern VR systems lack the ability to account for accommodation, leading to what is called "vergence-accommodation conflict". It can be a source of eye-strain for some people, but it tends to be adaptable over time. Note that I said "most" modern VR systems. It's an active area of hardware research, as the solutions--light field displays and varifocal lenses--are large, complex, and therefore expensive. The latest developments in "pancake" optics, where focal distance for the lens is folded in on itself via a clever system of internal reflectance, has a possibility of bringing the size down, but unfortunately not the complexity or cost. So again, it's really not fair to say developers are "ignoring" these problems. We are all extremely aware of the them. There are just some things you can't do anything about without a major breakthrough.

Abishek_Muthian 4y ago
> Fixed-view, wearable displays violate proprioception even more than VR HMDs, because they don't even give you the real acceleration cues you get from actually moving your head. This is unfortunate, I have severe motion sickness; Can't even play Minecraft or any FPS. So VR headsets are out of question. I was waiting for display glasses like Lenovo's T1 for years now[1] due to its accessibility benefits. From what you say, It seems like I would be sick if I use display glasses too until the proprioception issues are resolved and I'm glad that it's being seriously researched. [1] https://needgap.com/problems/16-wearable-low-latency-display-for-computers-display-wearables https://needgap.com/problems/16-wearable-low-latency-display... (Disclosure: My problem validation forum).

codeulike 4y ago

They are barking up the wrong tree, because as far as I know, no developer is paying attention to proprioception. Not sure what you mean by this. VR headsets know exactly where your hands are and can infer most of the rest of your pose from head height, they rely pretty heavily on that for the immersion.

Maursault 4y ago
While position tracking is important, what I was talking about was the user's sense of proprioception. Seems to me that too much attention has been given to tuning the visual response to the user turning their head or looking up and down, or turning around, and little to no attention being given to attenuating the user's sense of proprioception, to reenforcing the feeling that the virtual body parts are an integral part of the user's actual real-world body.
- codeulike 4y ago
  Have you used any modern VR sets?
  - Maursault 4y ago
    Depends. Are you attacking my credibility with an ad hominem fallacy? Just wondering. Because if so, it is only because my argument has confounded you, and if you can't beat that, maybe you can beat me.
    - codeulike 4y ago
      But have you? Because I have and to me, within the confines of what is economically feasible (eg hand tracking but not leg tracking), they seem to spend a lot of effort on proprioception. I think in a conversation about VR it's ok to ask whether youve actually used it.
      - Maursault 4y ago
        > I think in a conversation about VR it's ok to ask whether youve actually used it. I don't see how it's relevant. Nearly all VR insights came from those who never actually used it, namely because it didn't exist yet. But, in fact, I have used VR quite extensively. I do own or have owned or borrowed or used or demoed at least 50 different models over the last 25 years, and my experience over the last decade has only ever reinforced this grievance, that VR hardware developers and content producers are paying little to no attention to the user's proprioception, and nothing I have ever seen, neither in my own experience, in depth reviews, documentation, nor your own statements has led me to believe otherwise. Though the component technology is getting better all the time, the VR development is no different than it was in 1996. It's as though developers are either entirely unaware that proprioception exists, or are aware and think it will take care of itself. And though it does sometimes, accidentally, it is not every time and always, and there is no great reason why it shouldn't, other than that developers apparently either haven't discovered it, or haven't discovered how. Quid pro quo, now please give me your VR credentials so I know I'm not wasting my time. After all, once you can no longer speak to someone's argument, you think it is ok to personally attack them. So let's scrutinize your experience and knowledge in kind and see how much of an expert you really are, and maybe see if we can't get you to realize that when your ability to persuade fails, and you have no further ability to make valid argument and nothing more to offer, then you should really simply stop, leave others alone, and not try to bully or attempt to humiliate them with personal attack.

bradknowles 4y ago

There is the focal distance, which is the distance at which your eyes need to focus. I'm pretty near-sighted, so my focal distance is short. There is also the focal angle, which is the angle your eyes have to be at to focus at a particular point which is a given distance away. As we evolved over millions of years, the focal angle corresponded to the focal distance the angle would get get closer and closer to zero (where your eyes are angled parallel to each other), the further away something was. But with modern VR systems, they feed different images to each eye, and they give you different focal angles (to make things appear further away or closer together), but the focal distance doesn't change -- it's still that screen that is millimeters away from your eyeballs. So, your visual systems get all kinds of screwed up. So far as I know, this problem is not something that can be corrected with any modern VR system. AR is different, since you're layering one generated visual image with one screen that both eyeballs are looking at and that gets put on top of the actual real world image that you can see.