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Virtual reality technology has certainly improved over the last couple years. Several features and developments like standalone VR headsets, inside-out positional tracking, and full-scale body tracking are advancing at a rapid pace.
One field which looks especially promising is the study of VR display technology. In a bid to push its VR drive further, the R&D Division of Oculus recently published a paper highlighting the details for multi-focal display technology that can feature eye-tracking assistance.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Ok2cwW0xtaE
Understanding the Existing VR Display Technology
With the purchase of the existing available consumer VR headsets, users usually get a fixed-focus display plane, something which is technically referred as the “vergence-accommodation conflict”. Although its sounds technically very complex, it is really not that difficult to understand.
The inability of the user to focus correctly is mainly because the existing display does not provide realistic focus cues. This accounts for a less comfortable and less realistic viewing experience.
Image: Oculus
A display plane refers to one slice of depth in the rendered scene. by incorporating enhanced and accurate eye-tracking features along with the creation of several independent display planes, each taken from the differential areas of the fore and background, one can mimic a retinal blur.
Oculus’ Research team with its “perceptual” testbed wants to go even a step further. The researchers at Oculus’ R&D Division say that they want to deliver a testbed with higher hardware accuracy and a better understanding of the computational demand. They want to create a system which not only tracks user’s retina movements but also adjusts itself to multi-planar scenes and corrects itself every time in coordination with the eye and head movement.
Views from the Experts
While commenting on this recent development by Oculus, Research scientist Kevin MacKenzie said: “We wanted to improve the capability of accurately measuring the accommodation response and presenting the highest quality images possible. “It’s amazing to think that after many decades of research by very talented vision scientists, the question about how the eye’s focusing system is driven—and what stimulus it uses to optimize focus—is still not well delineated.”
MacKenzie further explained that “The most exciting part of the system build is in the number of experimental questions we can answer with it—questions that could only be answered with this level of integration between stimulus presentation and oculomotor measurement.”
The Oculus team says that its display technology is compatible with the existing GPU implementations and achieves a “three-orders-of magnitude speedup over previous work.” This team believes that going forward, its work will set the base for implementing practical eye-tracking and rendering requirements for multi-focal displays.
Research Scientist at Oculus Marina Zannoli says “The ability to prototype new hardware and software as well as measure perception and physiological responses of the viewer has opened not only new opportunities for product development, but also for advancing basic vision science.”
She further added: “This platform should help us better understand the role of optical blur in depth perception as well as uncover the underlying mechanisms that drive convergence and accommodation. These two areas of research will have a direct impact on our ability to create comfortable and immersive experiences in VR.”
Well, one thing is sure. Once all this multi-focal display is implemented, we are going to have a much more rich and immersive experience watching VR Porn.
hard to understand but worth waiting and experiencing
I never knew this existed until reading this article but now I must have it!
YES…. multi-focal display will really enhance the VR experience and feel.