Hi. I haven’t even tried any form of VR and have always been pretty skeptical. Curious about one issue though, perhaps some of you will know more about it.
Do most VR sets deal with eye spacing, and if so how? I figure it’s easy enough to change the distance between the two real time cameras, but what about the actual screens you look at, does the center point of the image on the screen move, is the unit physically adjustable, or is it just not a problem since eye spacing variance is somewhat limited?
Would love to hear if any of you have insight on this. (Also who has tried it and what did you think?)
There was an adjustment knob for distance to focus for your eyes.
As for like size of the head, I believe they’re fairly one size fits all, assuming you don’t have an extra large head.
My friend who showed me the device is approximately 6-1 (feet) I’m about 5-7 so we’re fairly different in size and weight. Worked for both of us without any issue.
So I assume if you’re in the average range of height weight and head size. It shouldn’t an issue.
As for trying it.
All skepticism about VR lost. It’s the future and it’s here.
I have played Eve Valkyrie on the oculus, we have an oculus in the office, and i also tried the samsug offering and google cardboard. Except cardboard it was pretty good. I think VR games will be boss and plan on making my own when the time comes.
But it is not yet.
How can you tell. Because you need to explicitly support specific hardware (Remember the first color monitors! ). Not generic VR. Once there is a proper cross hardware API then you know it worth the effort to dev in and it has finally properly arrived rather than an early adopter product as it is now.
I have kind of an interesting perspective on the “is it real” thing. Back in the 90s, I used my own money to purchase a VFX-1. I’d done VR research for many years (as in toyed with 3D graphics and merely wished I could do VR) so it was very exciting to have. A few games like Descent did VR exceptionally well for the time. By today’s standards the whole thing was basically a big giant turd but it was fun and very advanced for the day.
Over the beginning of the aughties (2000s) I did actual (for pay, fail half the time, for real) kind of 3D visualization research and VR was always on the periphery. Even in research circles it was sort of a non-starter though we were very (VERY) interested in AR.
Back then, you’d even talk to some people who thought VR was going to control their brain and stuff… kind of scary.
Fast forward to now, I no longer do that sort of thing unfortunately… though it means all of my graphics time is my own these days…
Recently, at a work “happy hour” at some restaurant the waiter overhears a bunch of us gamers talking about VR (Occulus, etc.) and offers to show us his VR on his phone (we declined).
But the point is that this is all very much in the public consciousness by now. It’s SO pervasive compared to before.
If Sony would let me preorder their helmet then I’d have one preordered already… but no one is selling preorders at the moment. $400 entry fee for cool VR is just crazy from the perspective of my own experiences.
I mean, this stuff is mainstream enough by now that there is already VR porn. That pretty much clinches it in my mind. Once you have porn for something, it’s around for good. Other than the military industrial complex, porn has done more for technological advancement than any other category.
You have done some very fascinating stuff! And here I was thinking of you as a humble cabinet builder
Do you know anything about the eye spacing though? I wonder as I love making old style pre-rendered background stuff, and I was thinking about VR and if it would actually look any good being stationary with 2 separate rendered images - but then I thought perhaps it isn’t at all possible if you can adjust the gap between the cameras which I figure you must have to?
Well, it’s not like binoculars where you have a very narrow field of view for each eye. Each eye has a lens into a whole wide field of view and yours eyes will mostly adjust to the lens placement. (Back in the day (early 90s) we used to create these crazy monitor VR setups where you had a partition between both eyes and so one eye viewed one half of the screen and the other the other half… it hurt after a while but it was workable.)
So beyond that, in the scene itself you can adjust the distance between the cameras which is I think what you are talking about. In my experience, that comes down to a setting similar to field of view… you might set it differently depending on your scene to achieve a desired effect. Being closer together will make the world seem larger, being farther apart will make the world seem smaller. I also remember that there was a focal point setting where you controlled where the two eye field of views crossed. This is also similar to a field of view setting… but for me (my eyes were stuck crossed when I was a baby and had to be corrected through surgery at six months old) if this is set funky then it really messes me up for a while.
Anyway, for fixed scenes it’s probably fine. For stuff far away you don’t even really need parallax at all. Modern 3D movies are often not 3D at all and simply mask things into foreground, mid-ground, and far ground… with far ground often the same for both eyes depending on the effect. (So for example, in 3D graphics it’s ok to have a flat skybox.)
And there are VR movies… and clearly they can’t adjust the camera distance and relative orientation at playback time.
