5 ms·

1) No, the resolution is a function of the solid angle taken by the screen. Yes, there needs to be an uptick in PPIs but 8000x10000 is basically a hard cap on w

1) No, the resolution is a function of the solid angle taken by the screen. Yes, there needs to be an uptick in PPIs but 8000x10000 is basically a hard cap on what's necessary (corresponding to a field of view of 135x180 with a visual acuity of one arc minute). There are already prototypes doing 2000PPI so it'll be at most a few years. 2) It doesn't have to be clear that VR will succeed for it to represent a threat to IMAX's business.

Someone1234 11y ago
I like with #1 how you start with the word "no" but then repeat back to me what I said. So we both agree, you need a higher resolution than we have today to clone IMAX in VR, and we won't get that unless VR takes off (as funding is needed to produce the screens). VR also has the weight X factor, how heavy is this prototype 2000 PPI screen? And much would one cost? Both we agree on #1, we both said the same thing. > It doesn't have to be clear that VR will succeed for it to represent a threat to IMAX's business. I literally don't understand what it is you're trying to say. If VR fails, it isn't a threat to IMAX business by definition. Something that isn't popular or doesn't exist cannot be a threat to something else.
- dpark 11y ago
  He didn't repeat back what you said at all. You said this: > "But the "further" away you project the virtual movie screen, the higher the resolution of the VR headset needs to be to support it." He's saying that's not true. He's also right. The resolution the physical VR screens need is completely unrelated to "how far" you project the virtual screen.
  - Someone1234 11y ago
    As things get smaller a greater PPI is needed to render the same level of detail. You don't mind losing detail, sure, you can keep the resolution the same and keep making it smaller and smaller (distance and size are one in the same in this scenario). It ultimately boils down to "when detail gets smaller than a single pixel, it is lost." So the smaller the pixel the more detail you can render. To be honest if you're watching non-HD resolution content, current generation VR headsets at the high end might be able to project it across the room and maintain detail. But HD? S-HD? IMAX? Meh, we aren't there yet. And I agree with another comment that there is a "cap" on PPI. Once you reach it the human eye becomes the limitation, not the screen(s).
    - dpark 11y ago
      > As things get smaller a greater PPI is needed to render the same level of detail. It really doesn't work that way. If your VR display is too low-resolution to convincingly render a virtual display 15 feet away, then it's too low-resolution to convincingly render the virtual display 15 inches away. Your physical display has the same resolution regardless of where the virtual screen is, and if it lacks sufficient resolution to render an object convincingly, it just cannot do it regardless of how distantly the object is rendered. To put it another way, your display has the ability to render a certain amount of detail, full stop. Where a virtual object is rendered is irrelevant. Try this. Sit close to your monitor, close enough that text isn't crisp enough. Now zoom your display (Ctrl+'+' in most browsers), which is equivalent to bringing a virtual display closer. Note that the text still isn't crisp. If you could see the pixelation before, you can still see it. Moving the virtual display closer does nothing, because you aren't adding more resolution to the physical display.
      - Someone1234 11y ago
        > To put it another way, your display has the ability to render a certain amount of detail, full stop. Where a virtual object is rendered is irrelevant. But we're talking about a virtual display displaying pre-existing content (e.g. video footage). We aren't talking about the object itself. If it is one foot from you in virtual space, each pixel of video footage might be mapped 1:1 into each pixel of the VR headset's screen resolution. Therefore the loss of detail is 0%. Every pixel of video detail is transposed onto the display in the VR headset. If the virtual object is further way (e.g. six feet) it takes up a smaller percentage of the VR headset's display, and therefore fewer physical pixels on the VR headset's display are used to render it. So now instead of 1:1 you might be 1:4, and you're seeing 25% of the video's original detail actually rendered on the VR headset's display. > Try this. Sit close to your monitor, close enough that text isn't crisp enough. Now zoom your display (Ctrl+'+' in most browsers), which is equivalent to bringing a virtual display closer. Note that the text still isn't crisp. If you could see the pixelation before, you can still see it. Moving the virtual display closer does nothing, because you aren't adding more resolution to the physical display. Your analogy is backwards and doesn't apply. But sticking to that same analogy, go get 1080p resolution image. View it on a 1080p display. You're seeing 1:1 (100%) of the detail within the image (all of it). Now zoom out, and again, and again. Detail has been lost. First a little, then a lot, and as you go too far back substantial amounts have been. This is because a 1080p image on a 1080p display can only display 100% of the detail when it is viewed at 100%. As the image is zoomed (or further away in the VR headset's case) it is not possible to continue to consume all of the details as the pixels don't physically exist to display it. So solve this problem you need a higher resolution than the source material, and it gets higher and higher the more you zoom. If you viewed a 1080p image on a 8640p display, you could zoom out significantly with absolutely no loss of detail, because the pixel density is such that it can still render every dot within the image. So in order for a VR headset to be able to render stuff far away with no loss of detail the resolution of the headset has to be much higher than the source video. The further away the video gets, the higher the resolution. Again, that is if you want absolutely no loss of detail (in the real world, some loss of detail is acceptable). In order to play back a 1080p video on a 1080p VR headset, the video either needs to be right in front of the viewer (at 1:1), you'll have to accept loss of detail when moving it further away, or you'll need a higher resolution on the VR headset than the source video (e.g. 4x more pixels on the headset than the source video, when it only takes up 1/4th of the VR headset's display space). If the virtual display-video is only 1cm squared on each of the VR headset's displays, then that 1cm needs to have the same pixels as 1080p to display 1080p video with no loss of detail. It is just physics. As you move things further away in virtual reality they get rendered by fewer pixels on the real-world VR headset displays, and therefore loss of detail is unavoidable. You can only counteract this with higher PPI than the source video (or just accepting the loss of detail).
- tgb 11y ago
  No, you said it depends on virtual screen distance, mubard said it depends on solid angle. Mubard is correct and more relevant to the idea of "make the virtual screen larger and further away" which has an implied constraint where the solid angle is kept constant. No one would argue that the coming gen vr devices are at the pixels per degree of IMAX, that's just wrong. Edit: why are so many comments (particularly top level ones) down voted in this thread?
  - Someone1234 11y ago
    > No, you said it depends on virtual screen distance, mubard said it depends on solid angle. No, I said it cannot do virtual screen rendering at lower resolutions. mubard agreed. The virtual screen would look terrible as you pulled back if the resolution wasn't high enough to support it (which I don't believe it is, yet).
    - dpark 11y ago
      It has nothing to do with "pulling back" the screen. If the physical display resolution is not high enough, the virtual screen will look terrible regardless of how "close" it is. Even if you were trying to show the pixels on the virtual screen by rendering it very "close", it would still look terrible, because the physical pixels would have insufficient resolution to render the virtual pixels uniquely and clearly.
    - murbard2 11y ago
      No you said: "But the "further" away you project the virtual movie screen, the higher the resolution of the VR headset" That is wrong, plain and simple. How far the movie screen appears in the VR headset has no impact whatsoever on pixelization and is purely a stereoscopic effect.
      - Someone1234 11y ago
        > How far the movie screen appears in the VR headset has no impact whatsoever on pixelization and is purely a stereoscopic effect We're talking about rendering pre-existing video at those distances, so it absolutely DOES cause pixelation as fewer pixels are used to render the video content than its native resolution. A lot of people calling me wrong seem to be under the odd mistaken impression that we're rendering some generic object far away, but the discussion is about display pre-existing video footage at a distance. If the VR headset is 1080p and the video footage is 1080p, if you put it far away (i.e. it only takes up 50% or 25% of the VR headset's screen real-estate) then it obviously cannot be rendered using all 1080p of the video's original pixels (since many are in use on the VR headset's display for non-video footage) and therefore a loss of detail is unavoidable. The only solution to this is having a higher PPI than the source video. And as you move the video footage further and further away, the PPI needs to increase to keep the video footage rendered at its native resolution.
Retric 11y ago
It's worse than that due to aliasing effects. Remember your rods are not aligned on a strict grid so need more than one pixel per rod. And, the eye contains ~120 million rods, so ignoring motion your already at ~40k x 40k per eye. Assuming you’re not moving they screen around to follow they eye or projecting on the retina 'resolution' would cap out at around 10 billion - 1 trillion pixels per eye. However, clearly you can get away with far less than that. But, the point where increasing resolution is not noticeable at some level is ridiculously high.
- JoeAltmaier 11y ago
  Confused: Sqrt(120M) is around 11000. Where did 40K come from?
  - Retric 11y ago
    Aliasing effects as you don't get 1:1 pixel per rod alignment. Currently we use 16xAA and Sqrt(16) = 4. So, 11,000 * 4 ~= 40K. Though the density is not constant over the eye so that's probably low balling it a little bit.

Someone1234 11y ago

I like with #1 how you start with the word "no" but then repeat back to me what I said. So we both agree, you need a higher resolution than we have today to clone IMAX in VR, and we won't get that unless VR takes off (as funding is needed to produce the screens). VR also has the weight X factor, how heavy is this prototype 2000 PPI screen? And much would one cost? Both we agree on #1, we both said the same thing. > It doesn't have to be clear that VR will succeed for it to represent a threat to IMAX's business. I literally don't understand what it is you're trying to say. If VR fails, it isn't a threat to IMAX business by definition. Something that isn't popular or doesn't exist cannot be a threat to something else.

dpark 11y ago
He didn't repeat back what you said at all. You said this: > "But the "further" away you project the virtual movie screen, the higher the resolution of the VR headset needs to be to support it." He's saying that's not true. He's also right. The resolution the physical VR screens need is completely unrelated to "how far" you project the virtual screen.
- Someone1234 11y ago
  As things get smaller a greater PPI is needed to render the same level of detail. You don't mind losing detail, sure, you can keep the resolution the same and keep making it smaller and smaller (distance and size are one in the same in this scenario). It ultimately boils down to "when detail gets smaller than a single pixel, it is lost." So the smaller the pixel the more detail you can render. To be honest if you're watching non-HD resolution content, current generation VR headsets at the high end might be able to project it across the room and maintain detail. But HD? S-HD? IMAX? Meh, we aren't there yet. And I agree with another comment that there is a "cap" on PPI. Once you reach it the human eye becomes the limitation, not the screen(s).
  - dpark 11y ago
    > As things get smaller a greater PPI is needed to render the same level of detail. It really doesn't work that way. If your VR display is too low-resolution to convincingly render a virtual display 15 feet away, then it's too low-resolution to convincingly render the virtual display 15 inches away. Your physical display has the same resolution regardless of where the virtual screen is, and if it lacks sufficient resolution to render an object convincingly, it just cannot do it regardless of how distantly the object is rendered. To put it another way, your display has the ability to render a certain amount of detail, full stop. Where a virtual object is rendered is irrelevant. Try this. Sit close to your monitor, close enough that text isn't crisp enough. Now zoom your display (Ctrl+'+' in most browsers), which is equivalent to bringing a virtual display closer. Note that the text still isn't crisp. If you could see the pixelation before, you can still see it. Moving the virtual display closer does nothing, because you aren't adding more resolution to the physical display.
    - Someone1234 11y ago
      > To put it another way, your display has the ability to render a certain amount of detail, full stop. Where a virtual object is rendered is irrelevant. But we're talking about a virtual display displaying pre-existing content (e.g. video footage). We aren't talking about the object itself. If it is one foot from you in virtual space, each pixel of video footage might be mapped 1:1 into each pixel of the VR headset's screen resolution. Therefore the loss of detail is 0%. Every pixel of video detail is transposed onto the display in the VR headset. If the virtual object is further way (e.g. six feet) it takes up a smaller percentage of the VR headset's display, and therefore fewer physical pixels on the VR headset's display are used to render it. So now instead of 1:1 you might be 1:4, and you're seeing 25% of the video's original detail actually rendered on the VR headset's display. > Try this. Sit close to your monitor, close enough that text isn't crisp enough. Now zoom your display (Ctrl+'+' in most browsers), which is equivalent to bringing a virtual display closer. Note that the text still isn't crisp. If you could see the pixelation before, you can still see it. Moving the virtual display closer does nothing, because you aren't adding more resolution to the physical display. Your analogy is backwards and doesn't apply. But sticking to that same analogy, go get 1080p resolution image. View it on a 1080p display. You're seeing 1:1 (100%) of the detail within the image (all of it). Now zoom out, and again, and again. Detail has been lost. First a little, then a lot, and as you go too far back substantial amounts have been. This is because a 1080p image on a 1080p display can only display 100% of the detail when it is viewed at 100%. As the image is zoomed (or further away in the VR headset's case) it is not possible to continue to consume all of the details as the pixels don't physically exist to display it. So solve this problem you need a higher resolution than the source material, and it gets higher and higher the more you zoom. If you viewed a 1080p image on a 8640p display, you could zoom out significantly with absolutely no loss of detail, because the pixel density is such that it can still render every dot within the image. So in order for a VR headset to be able to render stuff far away with no loss of detail the resolution of the headset has to be much higher than the source video. The further away the video gets, the higher the resolution. Again, that is if you want absolutely no loss of detail (in the real world, some loss of detail is acceptable). In order to play back a 1080p video on a 1080p VR headset, the video either needs to be right in front of the viewer (at 1:1), you'll have to accept loss of detail when moving it further away, or you'll need a higher resolution on the VR headset than the source video (e.g. 4x more pixels on the headset than the source video, when it only takes up 1/4th of the VR headset's display space). If the virtual display-video is only 1cm squared on each of the VR headset's displays, then that 1cm needs to have the same pixels as 1080p to display 1080p video with no loss of detail. It is just physics. As you move things further away in virtual reality they get rendered by fewer pixels on the real-world VR headset displays, and therefore loss of detail is unavoidable. You can only counteract this with higher PPI than the source video (or just accepting the loss of detail).
tgb 11y ago
No, you said it depends on virtual screen distance, mubard said it depends on solid angle. Mubard is correct and more relevant to the idea of "make the virtual screen larger and further away" which has an implied constraint where the solid angle is kept constant. No one would argue that the coming gen vr devices are at the pixels per degree of IMAX, that's just wrong. Edit: why are so many comments (particularly top level ones) down voted in this thread?
- Someone1234 11y ago
  > No, you said it depends on virtual screen distance, mubard said it depends on solid angle. No, I said it cannot do virtual screen rendering at lower resolutions. mubard agreed. The virtual screen would look terrible as you pulled back if the resolution wasn't high enough to support it (which I don't believe it is, yet).
  - dpark 11y ago
    It has nothing to do with "pulling back" the screen. If the physical display resolution is not high enough, the virtual screen will look terrible regardless of how "close" it is. Even if you were trying to show the pixels on the virtual screen by rendering it very "close", it would still look terrible, because the physical pixels would have insufficient resolution to render the virtual pixels uniquely and clearly.
  - murbard2 11y ago
    No you said: "But the "further" away you project the virtual movie screen, the higher the resolution of the VR headset" That is wrong, plain and simple. How far the movie screen appears in the VR headset has no impact whatsoever on pixelization and is purely a stereoscopic effect.
    - Someone1234 11y ago
      > How far the movie screen appears in the VR headset has no impact whatsoever on pixelization and is purely a stereoscopic effect We're talking about rendering pre-existing video at those distances, so it absolutely DOES cause pixelation as fewer pixels are used to render the video content than its native resolution. A lot of people calling me wrong seem to be under the odd mistaken impression that we're rendering some generic object far away, but the discussion is about display pre-existing video footage at a distance. If the VR headset is 1080p and the video footage is 1080p, if you put it far away (i.e. it only takes up 50% or 25% of the VR headset's screen real-estate) then it obviously cannot be rendered using all 1080p of the video's original pixels (since many are in use on the VR headset's display for non-video footage) and therefore a loss of detail is unavoidable. The only solution to this is having a higher PPI than the source video. And as you move the video footage further and further away, the PPI needs to increase to keep the video footage rendered at its native resolution.

Retric 11y ago

It's worse than that due to aliasing effects. Remember your rods are not aligned on a strict grid so need more than one pixel per rod. And, the eye contains ~120 million rods, so ignoring motion your already at ~40k x 40k per eye. Assuming you’re not moving they screen around to follow they eye or projecting on the retina 'resolution' would cap out at around 10 billion - 1 trillion pixels per eye. However, clearly you can get away with far less than that. But, the point where increasing resolution is not noticeable at some level is ridiculously high.

JoeAltmaier 11y ago
Confused: Sqrt(120M) is around 11000. Where did 40K come from?
- Retric 11y ago
  Aliasing effects as you don't get 1:1 pixel per rod alignment. Currently we use 16xAA and Sqrt(16) = 4. So, 11,000 * 4 ~= 40K. Though the density is not constant over the eye so that's probably low balling it a little bit.