Godrays dependant on eye health/vision (confirmed at least for me!)

[Blyss4226]

So I've had this theory for a while that the severity of the CV1 godrays might be related to people's individual eye health and eye sight. That's one of only two ways I know that explains the widely varying reports of how bad they are. The other would be a variation in the headsets themselves. I don't have multiple Rifts to try, but I do have my own eyes which are very bad. I see 20/60 in my left eye and 20/140 in my right i.e. I see 1/3 as good as a normal person in my left eye and 1/7th as good in my right.

As I stated in a thread I made a good while back I find the CV1 godrays to be incredibly bad - like spotlights emitting from every object in the scene bad. I did get used to them with time where they didn't bother me, but they were definitely horrible. Far worse than either of my friends with Rift experience them.

Today I got my contacts. And I just finished trying out the Rift with them. In addition to everything being clearer overall and finding the sweet spot being MUCH easier, the godrays are all but gone. Seriously. Correcting my vision took them from horrible and everywhere on everything to barely even able to be seen when looking for them.

So it's as I suspected - at least to some degree your vision affects how badly you perceive the godrays. My theory is that having bad vision sort of blurs out the godrays and makes them much much more noticeable by spreading them over a larger area. That's just a theory though.

Either way so my suggestion to those of you who experienced the godrays super badly like me would be to either A)Have your eyes checked if you never have or B)Wear your corrective lenses in the Rift. It's quite possible that it would clear it up for you like it did for me!

Also if anyone can relate a similar(or dissimilar) experience then please do!

[RedRizla]

Cool idea, these could also help protect the CV1 lenses.

[goldenegg]

I tried the Rift without corrective eye wear, with glasses and with contacts.  The 'god rays' were the same in all configurations.

[Blyss4226]

Firstly to clarify I did not mean that they go away completely - of course they are a property of fresnel lenses. But what doesn't make sense is GuyA says "Wow godrays are so horrible I'd rather use DK2" and GuyB says "Godrays? I barely if ever notice them.": That means there is some factor that is different and there are only so many factors in the system(the main two being your eyes and your Rift). It stands to reason that if people report different experiences of the godrays then one of those two things must be why.

Now as I said before my experience of godrays was like mind numbingly bad. To the point that it appears like there is a soft colored blur entirely over the lens. I made several threads about them and just could not understand why there were people saying it didn't bother them. I did learn to ignore them with time but that wasn't optimal for image quality.

If you understand how myopia works it makes sense how it could exacerbate such an effect. See this image I stole from Wikipedia:

See how the focus is in front of your actual retina? Which means from that point the light diverges from focus. The more nearsighted you are the more it's gonna diverge(and so the more blurry things will be). This will apply quite readily to a bright source like a screen for instance. What that means for nearsighted people in the Rift is the fresnel flaring(godrays) will affect more of the retina and thus more of the image your brain sees.

I tend to agree with @Rayvolution that mild/moderately nearsighted people don't think glasses/contacts are necessary since they don't think they are using distance vision in the Rift. However you totally do as has been said. Even aside from the godrays the overall experience of VR is just so much better with contacts for me.

Again I'm not saying it will eliminate them completely because that is in fact what fresnel lenses do. But it might change them from really really super bad to ignorable. Can't hurt to try! Certainly made my VR experience 100 times better!

[goldenegg]

While poor eyesight could potentially have some impact, I honestly don't believe that explains the differences people are seeing.  I do believe that other factors, such as a person's IPD and distance from the lenses would have a greater impact overall for people using the same headset.  You can even test this yourself, by moving around the headset and you'll notice the intensity of the rays can change dramatically.

I've now used 6 Rifts and no two of them performed the same.  These rays are one area where there has been a difference.  The Rifts which had the least impactful rays were those which appeared to have issues with their displays, with all of them being noticeably dimmer and many having the red tint problem.

[Percy1983]

I will say I wear glasses and don't see the god rays as an issue, with that I have them most of the time in the real world as I hardly clean my glasses.

[Blyss4226]

goldenegg said:

While poor eyesight could potentially have some impact, I honestly don't believe that explains the differences people are seeing.  I do believe that other factors, such as a person's IPD and distance from the lenses would have a greater impact overall for people using the same headset.  You can even test this yourself, by moving around the headset and you'll notice the intensity of the rays can change dramatically.

I've now used 6 Rifts and no two of them performed the same.  These rays are one area where there has been a difference.  The Rifts which had the least impactful rays were those which appeared to have issues with their displays, with all of them being noticeably dimmer and many having the red tint problem.

Good info, thanks for posting that. One thing important is that wearing contacts massively changed where the "sweet spot" on the Rift lens is for me. I'm looking through a completely different(more central) part of the lens than I was before. That may be part of the reason why they diminished too.

Before I had to wear the Rift at an angle and shifted very left(to the point my nose touched the right eyepiece mount) in order to be in focus. Wearing it angled is because of my eyes being very different in their vision. Shifting it left is the only way I could ever get the vertical line to focus. Now that I wear contacts in there I pretty much wear it dead center. This definitely could be part of the difference!

Also interesting is that my Rift had the red tint on dark scenes issue until the last OH update(which came with a firmware update). You say Rifts with that have LESS godrays? Hmm.