Been testing my new Oculus Quest for past few hours, wanted to share some impressions.
Looks like I started noticing pixels on Quest one or two hours in, but that’s only if I focus on them.
It feels that VR hardware needs a much wider field of view than what it currently offers. Currently the experience feels like you’re wearing a scuba mask, or, rather, looking through binoculars. Smallish field of view greatly reduces area where binocular vision works. I think only half or even one third of visible area is truly sterescopic.
Finger tracking is a great feature, but.
For some reason many application get it wrong. For example, Oculus Interface fails to understand normal paradigm is pointing at buttons with your index finger, and instead you need to aim with your whole arm and pinch. This is odd. Hands are cool, but hand interaction with environment is done wrong.
A lot of content fails to adjust to sitting posture and assumes that you have large play area. I feel like some games assume that where your headset is relative to the floor is your actual height, and if you’re sitting in a chair, that can result in adventures of Gulliver experience.
Likewise, correct portrayal of scale is very often overlooked. There’s some great content in Oculus TV, documentary videos that have depth, and not just “surround video”, but a lot of content appears at a wrong scale. For example, people being too small or too large is an incredibly common problem. It is not too bad, but it is slightly distracting, as you often end up in world of liliputians or something like that. Maybe there is a need for some sort of different video format that can adjust to user’s differences better. Like, I don’t know voxelized streams, semi-reconstructed scenes, and so on.
Apparently in case of VR videos, 180 degree coverage (“half-sphere”) provides more punch than full 360. Full 360 video has, for some reason, less pronounced depth and is often missing depth information altogether. And in case of 360 degree coverage you’r missing half of the content anyway.
I also found visual style used by “animated experiences” in quest (or whatever their name is) to be very interesting. This reminds me of “another world” visuals. They’re probably onto something. Seems those were made with Quill.
It seems that it is easier for “non-advanced” computer users to use this kind of headset. I gave the headset to family members to play with “Elixir” demo (hand tracking), after some confusion, they had less difficulty adapting to the environment, I think.
Apparently antialiasing plays much bigger role, due limited screen resolution. I’ve fired up sketchfab app in VR, and looks horrible, compared to other experiences for platform. It looks like sketchfab player didn’t bother to implement antialising. Another possibility is low fps on some scenes rendered by Quest.
Smallish text can look … interesting at the edge of your vision, because displays are flat, and if text falls into binocular vision area, this can result in sort of incorrect overlap of pixels, causing some of them to, I don’t know “shimmer” or take on silvery appearance.
I think at some point we could possibly get some sort of “bug eye display” with screens being concave and focused around each eye, with wider view, but that’s just a thought.
Index has better field of view than Quest, and StarVR has even better. Problem with larger than lets say Index FOV is that you get super sensitive to artificial locomotion. And teleportaion is no fun. It can be solved, for example we have an option to reduce FOV while moving
I cant speak for Quest but PC headsets and software (its mostly a software issue) are fully stereo over the entire field of view. But your peripheral vision is not as sensitive as your center field of vision.
Yeah, scale is a problem for many devs it seems, even Half Life Alyx gets scale wrong. We have put in alot of effort to get it right. All items in hands are correct to the millimeter. We also try to scale environmental assets corretly., But sometimes they are a bit off. Almost no assets off the store are life size correct. They need work. Some even dontr have the correct aspect ratio, these are a pain to fix.
Yeah antialising is a huge thing in VR, thats why deferred redning is so hard to use. Most VR devs including ourself uses forward rendering.
Smaller text is actually OK on the index. We are soon getting to the sweet spot of VR HMD resultion, but we will need foveated rendering for performance reasons.
I’m sure there are RnD on curved displays and lenses for VR use, its just a question of time, but again, with wider FOV comes greater problems with sickness.
edit: also remeber, the Quest is not a 100% representation of premium VR on PC, while being very good for the price point.
Binocular vision only works in area where “vision cones” from both eyes overlap. You cannot get full overlap with nearby objects when FOV is limited, because there will be a lot of missing data.
My impression is that VR works comfortably with objects at half of arm’s length at best. Any closer than that and things start looking strange.
One other thing.
That’s not where the scale becomes wrong. For example, if IPD is incorrect, or head is at wrong height, then the brain may perceive things at wrong scale, and having them modeled with millimeter perception won’t matter. The whole world will look too small or too big.
This is what I experienced with 360 videos.
For example, Video of a Diver, a Shark… but with no depth information encoded. The diver is perceived as being 3 to 5 meters tall. Because the image is infinitely far away and has no parallax.
Video of Louvre Reconstruction - The director of Louvre is perceived as … 100…120 cm tall person. This one’s with full depth information. Apparently there’s IPD mismatch between me and camera settings.
Now the fun part - video about some tigers (depth encoded, but apparently poorly) - tiger is seen as roughly 3 times taller than a house cat. Kinda small. Now, I bring up menu, and menu shows up in front of the tiger and tiger’s perceived size baloons immediately, because now there’s a reference that is correctly perceived by my binocular vision. The tiger now has 2 meter shoulder height, definitely.
This stuff happens everywhere.
The worst situation happens with games that do not recognize sitting posture and apparently decide that my eye height is my full standing height. This causes world to visually shrink.
That’s the “scale problem” i’ve been referring to.
Given the FOV per eye, the area where vision is binocular will be lower than that FOV. Which is what indicated in the chart above.
Middle will be fuly stereoscopi vision, and the gray areas will be monoscopic side vision. This will be especially noticeable with large nearby objects.
Or, rather than “smaller”, you’ll have parabolic areas that starts few centimeters in front of your nose, where you have full perception of depth. For distant objects this area will get wider and wider, for nearby it will be quite small.
Im talking about scale. You are talking about overlapping vision cones, two completely different things. Again here Index is better btw, they have higher FOV, plus better projection where vision overlap towards nose.
Its the same thing in reality, close left eye and you will see right side of your nose. Close the other one and you will see vice versa side.
My guess is that objects appears smaller in some headsets when they are trying to squeeze in more field of view in too small displays, and lenses. The distance between your eyes, and the lences, and wearing glasses, or optical eye lenses will also change the perceived scale.
Can’t argue against what premium VR headsets need is peripheral vision, and some simple eye tracking to just render in high rez in the area where the player are looking.
I found a possible reason for objects appearaing too small. Apparently floor surface was placed too high. Sadly, Quest does not allow to manually adjust its height, and you need to move it by touching floor with the controller, and even in this case, it seems to be higher than where it should be by 1 or 2 centimeters.
Yeah, I know. That’s one of the reasons why I got quest and not Rift S. After testing Quest in the store, it became obvious that my IPD is outside of recommended values for the S. And S does not even have mechanical IPD slider, while Quest does.
Yeah floor height is really important for stuff like doors, railings, basicly world objects. Items in hand shouldn’t be affected though since these are free floating and does not rely on floor for reference.
Edit: though a sniper rifle with a long barrel can feel off since the barrel will have the wrong distance to floor when pointing down towards floor. Brain is super sensitive to anything being off
Can´t se how the position of the player camera above the floor could change anything but the perspective. Different distance to objects though, or the floor, will change the perceived size of each object.
Some more information (maybe someone is interested?)
Apparently VR sickness does get better with continued use, as I can now play blade and sorcery and alyx for prolonged time with smooth movement.
Unfortunatley, in case of alyx, it seems that after two hours of movement nausea and queasiness still kicks in, except it now hits like a truck.
I think oculus screwed up with USB connectors, as apparently it is quite difficult to find a USB-C–>USB-A cable that can handle required speed. “High quality” cables are ridiculously rare, it is unclear how to detect a cable without problems, as there are few reviews of cables by people who tried to use cable with Quest, but ran into problems. So, I’m stuck with Virtual Desktop streaming for PC use
If you have some spare time over, perhaps you could make some field studies to find out how a limited peripheral vision will affect your performance, or do to your over all comfort?
Just wear a diving mask, maby combined with a tube for each eye, to limit your field of view. Use that in some bussy situations, like judging a tennis match, or playing basketball, or just take a ride in a roller coaster.
To simulate so called fixed foveated rendering, I guess the field of view has to be limited even further by smudging the glasses with some hand cream to just leave a clear spot in the middle of your sight.
It’s individual, some get their VR legs right away, some after a while, some never gain them. Reducing FOV does help. We have a option for that in our game.
I finally found a decent cable and got oculus link working… only to discover that my GPU technically isn’t supported by it. I have GTX 1060 3GB edition, and while it runs perfectly smaller applications, it runs out of VRAM and stutters on more intensive games, but only if it is working through Oculus Link, and if it is running through VR desktop streaming, it is perfectly okay.
However, now I see, or rather feel difference in latency. Streamed Alyx feels a bit more sluggish compared to USB cable connection.
Can one of the moderators maybe move this back into general? I doubt this really belong to VR section dedicated to working with VR in unity. @zombiegorilla ? @hippocoder ?