210 Degree VR Headset With 5K Display Revealed By 'Payday' Developer Starbreeze 79
An anonymous reader writes: Starbreeze Studios has taken wraps off of StarVR, a new VR headset with dual displays comprising a 210 degree horizontal field of view with a total resolution of 5120x1440. The headset's origins come from InfinitEye, a company working on a super-wide dual-display headset back in 2013, which went into stealth mode for quite some time before being reborn as StarVR in partnership with Starbreeze Studios. The studio is the developer behind the Payday franchise, Brothers: A Tale of Two Sons, and now Overkill's The Walking Dead, which will have a VR component utilizing the new headset.
I guess I'm the only one (Score:2)
I'd just like to be able to watch movies on a headset and don't really care all that much about the VR aspects. I get it, for gamers it'll be awesome. I'm just not sure of the utility of VR for non-gaming entertainment.
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If you have the headset, why not add the VR stuff at the same time? Besides, some movie makers are considering adding VR aspects to their movies. Imagine being able to look around; even the action would probably still be limited to what's in front of you, it would add a whole new level of immersion. Certain movies will benefit greatly from this, though whether the additional cost and effort is worth it remains to be seen.
I imagine at some point first person movies are going to emerge for VR. Don't know how it will turn out but it could make for an interesting experiment in cinema.
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i've seen videos online that are made using GTA clips. I suppose that rockstar could provide access to the entire world in these clips to turn them into VR clips.
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I'll be interested when the resolution is good enough for productivity apps—Photoshop, IDEs/editors, etc. A virtual room full of monitors for the price/energy/materials of a couple smartphone displays and lenses...
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Heck, why go down. Why not shoot one into space. A truly immersive VR flight through orbit would be utterly epic.
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> Watching a youtube video of a skydive is kind of neat, but I think actually being along for the ride would be a gamer changer.
Check this out: https://www.youtube.com/watch?... [youtube.com]
Even better, watch it in the Youtube app on an Android phone/tablet.
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"I'd just like to be able to watch movies on a headset and don't really care all that much about the VR aspects. I get it, for gamers it'll be awesome. I'm just not sure of the utility of VR for non-gaming entertainment."
If you watch a movie and you see the victims' eyes widen in fear, you can look over your shoulder and see the killer coming at them.
It's like a hologram but you're in the middle of it instead of outside.
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There are ways that it could be used for entertainment like that but I think it'd actually not end up being that well done. Consider that currently one of the more important elements of a movie is the skill with which it is shot. That is to say that the style and manner in which you record the actors can be as important as the story it's self. And it isn't just about making sure the viewer can see everything that is happening, often times not showing things on screen is just as critical as putting them fron
Links? (Score:4, Funny)
Hey timothy, what's with the "bit.ly" strings? Don't you know how to make simple HREF tags anymore?
What's the refresh rate and response time? (Score:3)
Because those are going to be the two showstoppers, as always. Until we have VR headsets that are effectively "transparent" to the player biologically they're not going to be more than a gimmick.
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Not to mention that to drive a 5120x1440 display at the necessary refresh rate, it's going to take quite a lot of GPU power. I find it annoying when the framerate drops when playing games on a regular 2D display, I can't imagine how it would feel with a VR headset. Puke-o-rama?
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That's OK, it's likely to be expensive enough to where only people who can afford a pair of pissed-off graphics cards can afford it anyway.
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The most problematic part of the low frame rate VR can be mitigated/fixed by using a technique Carmack came up with called time warping:
https://youtu.be/WvtEXMlQQtI [youtu.be]
It uses the Z-buffer data and a 3D half sphere to make the 3D headtracking always have the full frame rate your VR equipment can provide, even if the rendering itself runs slowly.
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Considering an Intel Iris graphics chip can drive my 4K at 30fps which is HIGHER total pixel count than this headset (3840*2160/5120/1440=1.125 as many pixels) it really doesn't take that much of a graphics card to power one of these anymore. A $300-400 graphics card investment for a desktop for what's likely to be a couple hundred dollar headset seems pretty reasonable to me, and it's not like it needs to render all of the 3D at the full pixel resolution considering it needs to distortion-map the graphics
Re:What's the refresh rate and response time? (Score:4, Interesting)
Is your Intel Iris GPU driving a 4K, 2D desktop at 30fps or a 4K, 3D modern game at 30fps?
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That's a non-question, we already know it's going to cost your anal virginity.
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The problem of low refresh rate gets even worse as the FOV gets wider.
Human peripheral vision, while being far less detailed, is far MORE sensitive to movement and brightness, meaning that we can see screen flicker near the edges that we can't see directly in front of our eyes.
This is one of the reasons stopping Oculus from making a wider FOV headset. Widening FOV is easy, keeping people from getting sick is hard.
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And don't forgot the modern obsession with blur shaders like bloom and motion blur... despite the fact the human eye blurs anything fast moving anyway.
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It sounds like they're using Samsung's 1440p AMOLED panels. So the response time is almost instant, but I don't know if those panels can be driven at 90Hz.
I guess I'll do timothy's job (Score:5, Informative)
Starbreeze Studios has taken wraps off of StarVR, a new VR headset with dual displays comprising a 210 degree horizontal field of view [roadtovr.com] with a total resolution of 5120x1440. The headset's origins come from InfinitEye, a company working on a super-wide dual-display headset back in 2013 [roadtovr.com], which went into stealth mode for quite some time before being reborn as StarVR in partnership with Starbreeze Studios [starbreeze.com]. The studio is the developer behind the Payday franchise, Brothers: A Tale of Two Sons, and now 'Overkill's The Walking Dead', which will have a VR component utilizing the new headset.
Overkill's The Walking Dead? (Score:2)
This is VR. There's a lot of other options to choose from to entice people to buy your hardware.
Imagine a first-person-view Dead or Alive Xtreme Beach Volleyball. ^_^
1st person DoA (Score:3)
Imagine a first-person-view Dead or Alive Xtreme Beach Volleyball. ^_^
First person ? Dead or Alive ?
You mean risking to get hit in the face by your (avatar's) own oversized breast due to jiggle physics turned up to eleven ?
That surely is going to be a wonderful first-person experience.
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Well, I meant first-person view but as a 3rd-party player watching the game.
3rd party DoA (Score:3)
as a 3rd-party {..} watching the game.
External camera following the DoA girls ?
I see where this is going...
Unlock the special "colibri" mode and fly around following your team to the showers after a play !
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Sold!
Re:210 degree FOV? Useless! (Score:4, Funny)
right because your eyes are bolted into your head and thus cannot move!
all those wasted seconds spent on your dipshit commentary that nobody should ever fucking see.
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With eyeball rotation of about 90 (head rotation excluded, peripheral vision included), horizontal field of view is as high as 270
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Human_eye [wikipedia.org]
This is easy enough to confirm. Although not quite 270 degrees, I can sit with my head facing my computer monitor, and turn my eyes enough to see things about ~30 degrees behind me without strain. The field of view with eye movement is noticeably larger than 180-190 degrees.
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You failed.
" For example, binocular vision, which is the basis for stereopsis and is important for depth perception, covers only 114 degrees (horizontally) of the visual field in humans;[5] the remaining peripheral 60–70 degrees have no binocular vision (because only one eye can see those parts of the visual field)."
114+70 = ?
The placement of your eyes DIRECTLY EXCLUDES the possibility of seeing "Not quite 270 degrees" Your eyes cannot move 90 degrees in socket unless you've got seriously damaged or w
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More proof your source s bulshit:
http://www.vision-and-eye-heal... [vision-and...health.com]
https://upload.wikimedia.org/w... [wikimedia.org]
http://www.best-3dtvs.com/wp-c... [best-3dtvs.com]
http://www4.uwsp.edu/psych/dog... [uwsp.edu]
Unless your eyes are on the side of your head like a dog or bird, you aren't getting past 200 degrees FOV IN ANY SITUATION.
Re:210 degree FOV? Useless! (Score:5, Insightful)
Hi, CTO of Starbreeze here. Khyber's comment revealed an oversight that all of our highly trained engineers somehow missed over the last 12 months of design and testing. How silly of us! We will of course be going back to the drawing board now and redesigning the product to be more efficient, and firing all of the incompetents that led us into this embarrassing snafu.
Khyber, your instantaneous grasp of the subtle details of VR headset design marks you as some kind of prodigy/genius. Please contact our HR department immediately for a job interview; we're understandably quite eager to have you on our team.
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VR without 3D is really rather pointless. So the field of view is blocked by the requirement of showing two different images one to each eye. Now as both eyes have to track together that means, the left eye can see no further left than the right eye can see left because you do not want the right eye to ever see the left eye image. and the same in the other direction, this hugely limits the field of view. Doing a single image is of course mind bogglingly stupid because you have just abandoned 3D which will
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Highly trained engineers, eh?
Yea, please come back and talk to me after you've worked for one of the largest display manufacturers on the planet (Chi Mei) as their panel design engineer and optics alignment (we were doing VR headset wel before Oculus and others - remember the old Networked mech game in the arcades? Chi Mei designed those panels and VR headsets.)
AKA I've got years of experience over your fresh college-trained boys.
Try again when you're actually up to date with technology we had since the 90s
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LOL! [youtube.com]
wikipedia:
With eyeball rotation of about 90 degrees (head rotation excluded, peripheral vision included), horizontal field of view is as high as 270 degrees
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Yep, you go ahead and laugh because you're too lazy to read the contestor's wikipedia link and see the massive warnings written overhead compared to my chosen article, which has FAR BETTER SOURCING and ZERO WARNINGS at the top of the page.
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Yep, you go ahead and laugh because you're too lazy to read the contestor's wikipedia link
i laugh because you are so fucking stupid it's just amazing.
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You keep on laughing, then.
Considering I've had lots of experience over these start-ups (I worked for one of the biggest LCD supplier on the planet as an engineer, and I worked in their optics division) these people ARE FULL OF SHIT and fooling your supposedly brilliant ass with marketing.
I bet you fall for the "300w LED" (when it's only drawing 150w) bullshit marketing, too.
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Umm, no. According to wikipedia (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Human_eye) the average human eye has a horizontal field of view of about 155 degrees. 60* toward the nose, 95* away. If you include eye motion, that increases to as much as 270 degrees. Yes, that means you you can see a ways behind you without turning your head - try it sometime.
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They are probably using off-the-shelf panels, and it's cheaper to do 210 instead of 190.
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A typical human eye can see 100 degrees away from the nose. That's 200 degrees already.
Not everyone is identical, some people will see more, some less.
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Dunno. But whoever wins, we lose. Gaming will get more expensive and more gimmicky. For reference, see any "innovation" in the gaming world, from VR-Boy to Kinect.
Is it going to be sold like Payday? (Score:2)
I.e. you buy the frame and then you get to pay for the rest of it piece by piece?
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If you bought it for X, thinking that this would be the price, only to find out that it's X+n*X (with n being an arbitrary number pulled out of the maker's ass) to actually get what they promised, it's not.
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No, the DLC is not needed to play the game. But by that logic the KSP demo is a complete game, you don't need mods or additional planets just to play it.
If a game makes it very obvious that there are (going to be) missions that span 7 days while you get a total of two different three day missions (and none longer) with release, I can't really say that a game is "complete".
Still have a ways to go (Score:5, Interesting)
Incidentally, this is why I don't mind the increases in phone screen resolution, and why I don't think graphics cards are fast enough yet. Yes the resolution is excessive for use on a phone. But manufacturers are using it as an excuse to fund R&D into higher res screens which will one day be useful for VR overlay displays built into things like Google Glass and Microsoft HoloLens. And we're going to need low-power graphics cards to drive those high-resolution screens with virtual 3D images, so there's still a ways to go in improving those as well.
And for those of you saying you're not interested in a VR headset, the biggest impediment to the miniaturization of mobile computers right now is the screen. If you've ever taken apart a tablet or a phone, the electronics mostly fit into a thin PCB about the size of a ball point pen. People want a bigger-than phablet screen on their phones, but they don't want to carry something that big around in their pockets or purses. The obvious solution is to move the screen closer to the eye, like Glass or HoloLens. Then the display can cover the same angular field of view as a HDTV viewed a few feet away, but be much smaller in linear size than even a smartwatch. Moving the screen closer to your eye also increases the effective brightness, reducing the lighting requirement thus allowing you to use it all day with a smaller battery. My guess is this screen size problem will be solved either with VR-style glasses displays, or flexible screens which can roll up into something the size of a pen when not in use.
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Glass should be a monocle. If it was? I would buy one. I might even buy two and send you one just because you made me think of it. I wonder how much Google would charge me for a one-off?
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People who aren't interested in VR may be interested in augmented reality, like the stuff Magic Leap is developing.
VR has proven to be useful for things like training soldiers and experts in other fields, but it's not clear that it'll be useful for anything else. AR is pretty much guaranteed to be useful if it will work, because augmenting reality is pretty much useful by definition.
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Except you don't need that kind of resolution across the entire field of view. You'd you need that kind of resolution in the center and as you get further away from that point you can have lower and lower resolution. I have no idea how you'd build a screen with that though. An alternative though would be to use lenses to take a smaller display and stretch it out to cover the full 210 degrees. That would also require some funny drivers though that would be squishing the outside 45 degree arcs or whatever int
a 210 degree headset (Score:1)
"Big Nose" problem. (Score:1)
The displays on this headset are angled apart, which means that both eyes cannot see both edges of both displays. If the left eye can't see much over to the right (and correspondingly, the right eye can't see much over to the left), then this display will suffer from the "big nose" problem. It's like when you place your flattened hand perpendicular to your face between your eyes.
The number I'd like to see is what the 100% overlap FOV is. That is, what's the FOV where both eyes can see the same imagery?