3 ms·

I guess I'm not sure why the video should need to be higher resolution for super-sampling than the pixel space it will be rendered on. Why it would need to be

I guess I'm not sure why the video should need to be higher resolution for super-sampling than the pixel space it will be rendered on. Why it would need to be higher resolution than the native pixel space that the virtual screen will be rendered over? Changing the angle or rotation of your head to the virtual screen only makes the virtual screen technically even lower resolution, and would make it so that you would notice an even lesser difference between higher and lower resolution videos being played on that virtual screen. I chose 50 FOV because I think it's reasonable near upper-bound. I am heavily into home theater, and I have tried various VR headsets to replicated a home theater projector setup. Personally I am a fan of sitting to my projector (or TV) screens where the width of the screen is equal to my viewing distance. This results in a horizontal FOV of 53.1 degrees. Now I often invite people over to my theater, or travel around and visit other people's HTs and I have found that most HT enthusiasts have no problems with this rough screen width-to-distance FOV for viewing movies. However maybe HT enthusiasts are not very representative of the masses, but anyway I was only using it as more of an upper-bound and what I have been looking for in a headset. If I want a virtual HT screen that has the native resolution of at least 1080p, and the headset has over 100 degree FOV (which most do), then I see that I need a headset to have more than 4000 pixels wide per eye, which sadly just doesn't exist yet. But, at least in my experience, I don't think the resolution of the video itself needs to be substantially higher than the pixel space of the virtual screen. I think that regular real-time machine learning video up-scaling techniques are sufficient enough these days to render the video in a way that wont cause bad artifacts when the virtual screen pixels are skewed because the headset wearer is tilting or turning their head in relation to the position of the virtual screen. Now I am fully aware that VR signal input also needs to be a higher resolution source than the native headset pixels, because there is some warping done to the image to make it look correct through the lenses, but that should only need to be applied to the 3D environment space the user is seeing. That means that the video being imposed into the virtual screen simply needs to be stretched via up-scale to a higher resolution and then this will be downscaled via the headset warp more or less back to its native resolution. But what you are saying does make sense and I am sure is somewhat of a factor. But then also, lower resolution video can still look quite fine once there is enough pixels to get good detail.

dagmx 3y ago
Your points are really good for home theatre playback,. However consider that in HT scenarios, you basically have your media and pixel array aligned in most cases. You essentially have a fairly straightforward interpolation before it goes to an analog space for viewing. In VR you have two. You have the plane the video is played on and then the display. That disparity can cause issues like aliasing or generally weird bluriness. You can see this even in relatively lower resolutin headsets like the Quest 2/3/Pro where even 1080p video often looks bad even though it’s occupying less than an actual 720p section of the display. And yes you’re right you could employ an upscaler. But the name of the game in VR is latency and power draw. NVIDIA has done great work in this field but they have a lot more latitude due to form factor. To the best of my knowledge, Apple tend to prefer straight decode and playback without AI upscalers on their devices.

dagmx 3y ago

Your points are really good for home theatre playback,. However consider that in HT scenarios, you basically have your media and pixel array aligned in most cases. You essentially have a fairly straightforward interpolation before it goes to an analog space for viewing. In VR you have two. You have the plane the video is played on and then the display. That disparity can cause issues like aliasing or generally weird bluriness. You can see this even in relatively lower resolutin headsets like the Quest 2/3/Pro where even 1080p video often looks bad even though it’s occupying less than an actual 720p section of the display. And yes you’re right you could employ an upscaler. But the name of the game in VR is latency and power draw. NVIDIA has done great work in this field but they have a lot more latitude due to form factor. To the best of my knowledge, Apple tend to prefer straight decode and playback without AI upscalers on their devices.