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Displays Google Hardware Technology

Google To Reveal 'World's Highest Resolution OLED-On-Glass Display' For VR Headsets (roadtovr.com) 77

An anonymous reader writes: Last year at SID Display Week 2017, Google's VP of VR/AR teased a "secret project" that the company was working on -- a VR-optimized OLED panel capable of 20 megapixels per eye -- which was being undertaken with "one of the leading OLED manufacturers." This year, the schedule for SID Display Week 2018 indicates that Google plans to reveal its made-for-VR panel on May 22nd, which it calls the "world's highest resolution (18 megapixel, 1443 ppi) OLED-on-glass display." The company plans to detail the display in a presentation at the event, which will be co-presented with engineers from LG, suggesting the identity of the second partner on the project. Ideal for VR, the 4.3-inch panel is capable of 120Hz refresh rate and is expected to have a resolution of some 5,500 by 3,000, representing a massive leap over today's leading VR panels which offer 1,600 by 1,440 resolutions at 90Hz.
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Google To Reveal 'World's Highest Resolution OLED-On-Glass Display' For VR Headsets

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  • by Anonymous Coward

    I've seen way too much evidence of Google's seemingly psychotic behavior with respect to committing to a project and then killing that project off like it was a cockroach.

    When a credible company brings such a product to market, I'll consider it. In the mean time, I'm quite certain I will live very well indeed without this stuff.

    • Not to mention OLED is pretty much a disposable technology. When it's normal non-degrading LED technology I'll be interested.

      • by Megol ( 3135005 )

        LED degrades and LCD (what I assume you meant) actually do too. But both of those are better than OLEDs.

        The backlight of an LCD panel I read the specs for recently had a specified lifetime of 15k hours and that's of course due to the fact it degrades.

    • Are you a VR headset manufacturer? If not, your concerns don't concern you.
  • by Anonymous Coward

    Is a mid sized desktop display maybe 22" with a ratio of 16:10 and 4K resolution. IBM made such a device 15 years ago but you can't get anything close today.

  • I want (Score:4, Insightful)

    by 110010001000 ( 697113 ) on Monday March 12, 2018 @10:20PM (#56250351) Homepage Journal
    I would buy a VR headset with that! It might solve the motion sickness and eyestrain issues with typical VR headsets.
    • by rtb61 ( 674572 )

      Who the hell wants a head set. I want a set of lightweight glasses, with optometrist ground lenses for a perfect fit, with a light excluding pull on shroud for when I want to exclude light and no motion required strictly fixed point of view, just a 125" big screen in my pocket, probably curved screens, way better than flat. I would not run any Google software on it though, eww, pushing targets subliminal ads focusing on politics or any other sjw freak shite, just awful. If the hardware is good great but def

    • Quite the opposite. More pixels doesn't solve motion sickness problems one bit, but it does make it impossible for current hardware to deliver the results at a low latency, and THAT is what cause the sickness and eyestrain issues.

  • Not for home use (Score:2, Informative)

    by Anonymous Coward

    Since everything that could be used to drive these panels will be mining coins, nobody can use these at home.

    • by aliquis ( 678370 )

      You can have flat surfaces and very few polygons.

      There's no problem rendering at that resolution.

      But the scene won't have a lot of details in it if you don't put them there of course.

      Also it won't look "real" if you don't. But games don't really have to look very real to be fun. Fun is a different thing than looking real.

  • by Solandri ( 704621 ) on Monday March 12, 2018 @11:16PM (#56250519)

    is expected to have a resolution of some 5,500 by 3,000,

    Current VR displays cover about a 200 degree field of view. 20/20 vision is defined as the ability to distinguish a line pair spaced 1 arc-minute apart, so 2 pixels per arc-minute. So this corresponds to (200 degrees) * (60 arc-minutes/degree) * (2 pixels/arc-minute) = 24,000 pixels. You need a display that's 24,000 pixels wide for it to display a 200 degree field of view and have the individual pixels not be discernible to the eye. So this display will be a little more than 1/5 of the way there.

    Put another way, the angular resolution of this new VR headset will be (5500 pixels) / (200 degrees) = 27.5 pixels per degree. That's about the angular resolution of [phrogz.net] a 50" 1080p HDTV viewed from 31" away. Or a 24" 1080p monitor viewed from 15" away. The pixels will still be painfully obvious.

    • Current VR displays cover about a 200 degree field of view

      Not even close.

    • by The Raven ( 30575 ) on Tuesday March 13, 2018 @03:41AM (#56251045) Homepage

      This is not false, but it is not quite true either.

      How often do you look as far left as possible? Rarely. We only actively look around directly within about 30-50% of our full view capability, except in the rare cases when we're trying to look at something without others knowing (ie, side-eye). So only the central visual field needs this level of pixel density to be nearly indistinguishable from real life's resolution. The visual fidelity could drop to 1/2 or even 1/4 outside this and you'd barely notice. Now, that's still 12-15000 pixels across. It's still massively higher than we're capable of now. But about a quarter of the pixels Solandri posited would be necessary.

      In addition, we can render even fewer pixels with eye tracking. This has already been successfully tested on current equipment with eye tracking and foveated rendering... rendering the center at full resolution, but increasingly fewer pixels per inch as you go away from the center of vision. And it already workes very well, quartering the rendering power needed. With a massive full-vision FOV, it would reduce rendering by needs by 20-40 times.

      So that gargantuan 24k by 18k panel becomes a 16k by 12k panel (with a detailed center, and slightly fuzzier edges), with foveated rendering reducing the practical rendering needs down to 4k by 3k.

      That's still a huge ask for a modern system, but give it five years and that kind of rendering will be cake. We have fun times ahead of us.

      • This is not false, but it is not quite true either.

        How often do you look as far left as possible? Rarely. We only actively look around directly within about 30-50% of our full view capability, except in the rare cases when we're trying to look at something without others knowing (ie, side-eye). So only the central visual field needs this level of pixel density to be nearly indistinguishable from real life's resolution. The visual fidelity could drop to 1/2 or even 1/4 outside this and you'd barely notice.

        Which is exactly what ends up happening on modern VR headset (everything since the Occulus) which tend to use as simple as possible optics just to keep the image in focus (as opposed to older VR headset which used more complex optics to give perfect rectangular picture floating distorsion free in front) and use software compensation (shaders on the GPU to pre-distort the image in the opposite direction).

        Due to this pillow-shape distortion, more pixels are used in the middle of the image (where the eye looks

        • by chihowa ( 366380 )

          As proven by all the research done in VR since Occulus : the main drawback would be rendering speed/feedback loop.
          Will this eyesight tracking work fast enough so the image rendering doesn't lag too much behind the eye motion ? (Other wise you'd be seeing blurred image when ever you're looking around fast, as the eye motion overshoots the region that was rendered at high resolution by the fovea tracking you're advocating).

          Intelligent eye tracking could render the point of focus and likely immediate points of focus in higher resolution. If a monster is about to jump out of the bushes at you, it's obvious that you're going to quickly shift your gaze to it and ignore the foliage between it and your current gaze.

          In constructed media like games and movies, there is a lot of control or easy prediction regarding where people's gaze goes.

        • As proven by all the research done in VR since Occulus : the main drawback would be rendering speed/feedback loop.
          Will this eyesight tracking work fast enough so the image rendering doesn't lag too much behind the eye motion ?

          Already solved... nearly two years ago [roadtovr.com]. It hasn't been used yet because no mainstream headset has installed the eye tracking sensors needed. I'm sure patents or cost are a factor. But the tech works, and the higher resolution we get the more important foveated rendering will be. So it'

          • Already solved... nearly two years ago [roadtovr.com]. It hasn't been used yet because no mainstream headset has installed the eye tracking sensors needed.

            According to the source you cite : the system works at 250Hz to avoid the fovea out-running the the rendering.
            That is way much higher thant the 90 FPS target of Occulus Rift (designed so the *head-motion* doesn't out run display. Intertia, etc.).

            It will take some time until :
            - VR hardware catches up and makes screen that accept framerates beyond 250 FPS
            - The GPU rendering hardware is powerful enough so that, once factoring the foveated rendering speed gains, the over all system can stay above 250 FPS, as c

            • The eye gaze is tracked 250 times a second. Nowhere did it state that the scene needed to be rendered at 250Hz for the system to work. Sadly the NVIDIA report is paywalled, so I didn't read it... until now (thank you sci-hub). They demonstrated the technique using a standard Rift DK2, which means it rendered at a refresh rate of just 75Hz.

              Foveated rendering is held back by lack of gaze sensors in headsets, and probably patent and licensing costs... not technology or processing power.

  • Which is about the date hardware will be around to actually run a 5k+ VR headset...
    • by mentil ( 1748130 )

      HDMI 2.1 was just released last November, and supports 10k at 120Hz. Video cards will have trouble driving those resolutions at high frame rates for a while I expect.

      • on the other hand, stereo images is really one of the best situations for multi GPU rendering.

        Once the geometry is processed (which can be somewhat balanced accross multi GPUs),
        the rest of the rendering is different between both eyes (that's the whole point of parallax) with little inter-dependency.
        You can simply subdivide the VR image into "two eyes, one eye per GPU"

        (Though for objects far from eyes, the tesselation and rendering should be very similar / almost identical. Again that's due to the parallax).

    • Turns out HDMI cables don't have the bandwidth to do that. I wonder what the new cable standard will be? What's the maximum bandwidth of DataPort?
  • I expect that we'll never actually see headsets with panels this high-resolution. By the time video cards can drive VR software at this resolution, we'll have laser retinal displays [wikipedia.org]. The main problem holding these back in the past were rainbow artifacts appearing during fast eye saccades, but waveguides have recently been devised which should prevent this (can't find a source ATM).

  • Why do I need a laptop with one of these , a bluetooth keyboard/trackpad, and my existing cell phone's CPU? Sure, big battery, but my travel bag is about to get much lighter.

  • What we really need for VR is 8000x4000 pixel screens, so the user can't see the pixels. The pixels per inch is irrelevant, since there is a lens between the screen and the eye anyway.
  • what machine will power this? if you see the specs for the current best vr headsets, which don't come close to this, it's already a very powerful and expensive build.

I have hardly ever known a mathematician who was capable of reasoning. -- Plato

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