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Possible cheap method to increase field-of-view?

EarlGrey
Expert Protege
I've been thinking about all this black stuff you see in the rift. Why does the interior of the rift have so much opaque black plastic? The entire interior is black, and the lense-piece has black plastic. As a result the only light you see is through the lenses, and you feel like you're watching through binoculars.

My thought is ... what if all this black plastic is transparent so that no part of the screen was occluded by this black plastic? If we were to replace the black plastic in the lense-piece with a transparent material then suddenly our eyes would see more of the screen behind the lenses.

Also, the walls of the interior could be in a reflective material for the purpose to reflect the screen light to your peripherals.

Just imagine a person with horrible eye sight, he uses glasses to get better vision. Without his glasses he can't really see much. Now, he sees better through the glasses, but his peripheral vision is not covered by the glasses so his peripheral vision is still "bad". But I don't think matters?

Sure it's not perfect, but the goal is to increase peripheral vision.



I don't have any tools to create a transparent lense-piece. I wonder if anyone can try this out on their spare lense pieces? :geek:
9 REPLIES 9

nosys70
Expert Protege
if you got light scattering and reflecting everywhere in the rift, you would get strange disturbing reflections.
That is why every system that capture light between 2 pieces of glasses is coated with black mat material.
you are on the way to reinvent ambilight.
that has already been proposed somewhere, to use some unused pixel from the rift to expand FOV, knowing you "feel" more than you "see" at the limit of your FOV.

CountBorgula
Protege
Yeah, these ideas have been discussed before. I played around with my DK1 to put some kind of reflective material around the edges. It sort of worked but did produce a strange distortion aorund the edges rather than the seamless view I was after. I think the best solution would be a curved screen, or maybe little extra screens at the edges? Here is the thread on this subject.

viewtopic.php?f=26&t=4328

EarlGrey
Expert Protege
Well isn't the ultimate solution contact-lenses and a headset with a curved screen and perfect eye-tracking in order to distort the image in the focus areas?

SaiJinu
Honored Guest
Curved lenses with much more resolution each eye and a fov of 150-180 degree.
In next few years we will see some increase in fov and in the end we will have VR that would allow us to see as much as we see in real life more or less.

I want to see 8k each eye and with 180-220 field of view ,that will totally make u think u are in other place. I think in 4-6 years we will have that.
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VizionVR
Rising Star
What about a single lens that spans across the entire screen? It would have two areas that focus the screen, just like the individual lenses do now, while all non essential area would be used to manipulate the light in a way to enhance peripheral vision. The only black area needed is a vertical area down the center.
Not a Rift fanboi. Not a Vive fanboi. I'm a VR fanboi. Get it straight.

Wireline
Explorer
A while back I did a little experiment to see what difference peripheral vision would make in flight sims. The method was super-crude, in that all I did was turn my head to look out of the "window" of the plane, but turned my eyes back towards the windscreen so I was effectively peering through the edge of the Oculus lens. Of course, the right hand side of the cockpit was obscured, but it definitely gave a good sense of peripheral vision, and the impact was huge. More presence, more sense of speed and motion. Larger FOV with peripheral vision was on my wishlist for CV1, which probably wont happen, but would be interested to see what mods can do.

KydDynoMyte
Honored Guest
I wonder how hard it will be to train your eyes to not look at the added ambient peripheral area when turning your head and if you'll start not letting your eyes go out of that clear fov area in real life also.

EarlGrey
Expert Protege
Well I'd want to see it implemented as I imagine for me to admit it doesn't work.

Currently everything out of view in the rift doesn't get rendered on the display panel, it's black area. Wasted space.

This wasted area could be used to enhance your peripheral vision. I'm sure there are some tricks to make it work. A curved panel would be even better. Having the interior in some ambient light / semi reflective material, or simply white coating, could enhance your peripheral vision and fool your senses into experiencing wider FOV. Even just transparent plastic in the lense-cup might do wonders. I'd like to hack my unit but I don't own the unit all by myself.

We already accept pretty bad barrel distortion, so I don't see why when we accept one bad thing we can't accept another, if it enhances your experience.

bigmike20vt
Visionary
"SaiJinu" wrote:
Curved lenses with much more resolution each eye and a fov of 150-180 degree.
In next few years we will see some increase in fov and in the end we will have VR that would allow us to see as much as we see in real life more or less.

I want to see 8k each eye and with 180-220 field of view ,that will totally make u think u are in other place. I think in 4-6 years we will have that.


4-6 years?

I hope you are right but I would say more like 10+ imo, assuming you want that 8K & that FOV to be usable.

If we go back 10 years and see what we had then, we have not actually come on that much imo.

for instance F.E.A.R came out in 2005, and back then I played at 768P...... sure it looks a little dated now but the gap between that and say alien isolation @ 1080P is far less than the gap between what we have now in VR and what you are predicting in 5ish years time.
Fiat Coupe, gone. 350Z gone. Dirty nappies, no sleep & practical transport incoming. Thank goodness for VR 🙂