The Science Behind the InfinitEye's Panoramic Virtual Reality Headset 42
muterobert writes "The Oculus Rift has competition, and it's incredible. The InfinitEye has a 210 degree field of view (compared with the Oculus Rift's 90) and surrounds your peripheral vision in the game completely. Paul James from RoadToVR goes in-depth with the team behind the new device and finds out how high-FOV Virtual Reality really works. Quoting: 'At the present time, we are using 4 renders, 2 per eye. Left eye renders are centered on left eye, the first render is rotated 90 left and the second looks straight ahead, building two sides of a cube. Right eye renders are centered on its position, the first is rotated 90 degree right and the second looks straight ahead, two sides of another cube. We then process those renders in a final pass, building the distorted image.'"
Issues... (Score:5, Informative)
First, for the apples to apples portion of the discussion, that display technology is 45 degree FoV. Given the article is about a project largely of interest because they were ambitious to 210 degrees which is much higher than the still respectable 90 degrees of Rift, bringing in a 45 degree FoV product into the discussion isn't immediately helpful. Now you *could* be suggesting that the technology could do better if they wanted, but until that's demonstrated it would be risky to assume that. The most optimistic reference material I could find about that sort of design said '100 degree FoV could be possible' based on designs that acheived 60 degree FoV' (but that's not exactly an apt comparison, since that material predates DLP which means it isn't quite talking about the avegant solution). In short, Avegant is aiming squarely at private consumption of video content rather than immersion.
Second, a significant driver for these new projects is a realization that HMD isn't a market that can drive a lot of custom, one-off design work right now. In order to get to a technology that people can actually *get* at an approachable price, they are working to leverage mass-market display technologies that are largely paid for by their use in tablet and similar form factor applications. DLP into the eye is a bit more custom and will probably not be as cheap.
Also, this discussion is solely about the display technology, but a very large part of the work that Oculus is focused on is motion tracking, which is a pretty critical component.
Finally, at least that prototype doesn't exactly look like the poster child of 'glasses you could wear', it's still pretty bulky.
I'm not saying that Avegant should pack up and go home, it could be very promising, but that's not a good reason to tell Oculus and InfiniEye that they are on a dead end path either. Avegant doesn't waste available resolution like the alternatives, but currently there is no solution that leverages the full resolution of the utilized technology while also providing an immersive FoV, but the former point might be moot if the tablet manufacturers continue their one-upmanship to the tune of 3840x2160 7" displays.