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Some photos of Rift screen in action

marcel
Explorer
Somebody asked for a closeup photo of the Rift screen in another thread. I can't find the exact post anymore, so I will post it in a new thread.

The photo below shows reasonably accurate how the pixels look on the Rift screen (left side of the photo is a bit out of focus). I've tried to set the white balance of the photos as closely to what I see on the Rift. The color temperature on the Rift is much cooler than on my normal screen.

http://i49.tinypic.com/2m4f1ci.jpg

Apart from the lack of resolution, there is also the gaps between pixels that are quite noticeable. There has been talk of testing a diffusor, but I don't think that is a good idea. When I use the wrong eyecups, the screen is a tiny bit blurry but overall it's much more unpleasant to look at. So I prefer sharp pixels even with gaps between them.

Neither the lack of resolution or pixel gaps are a problem at all when you are close to objects. If you walk around in the room in the Tuscany demo, basically everything looks fine. But for stuff that is further away you really want more detail. For example, you'd really wish for twice of even 4 times the pixel detail in the church building you can see through the window.

This is even more noticeable in the "Museum of the Microstar" demo, the Dev kit really lacks the resolution to show the far-off walkways nicely. Because of the low resolution, it's hard to recognize what's going on. Far off stuff is a bit of a mush (especially because we are used to 1920x1080 pixel resolution over half the FOV):

http://i47.tinypic.com/2i96s29.jpg

Another small issue is that because of the plastic lenses, you see a lot of Blue/Yellow Chromatic Abberation:

http://i48.tinypic.com/a28zv5.jpg

Basically any edge with a lot of contrast that is not near the center of the view, shows a blue or yellow glow. It's not a big problem, but if the consumer Rift had less of this, it would certainly be an improvement. (More expensive lenses in cameras use special glass or coatings to prevent Chromatic Abberation, but I have no idea if this is a viable option for a 300$ product).

I'm very curious if a screen with 1920x1080 pixels would have enough resolution, or if an even higher res screen is needed. For dedicated Rift games you could keep the lower screen resolution in mind (by trying avoid really small details in the distance).

I've yet to play a real game with the Rift, and I'm sure I would simply enjoy the immersion (which is just awesome!) instead of pixel peeping. Hopefully the Hawken demo with Rift support will be released soon!
20 REPLIES 20

BrightEyes86
Honored Guest
A lens that distorted you'd struggle to remove ALL chromatic aberation, you might be able to make it a bit better but not much I'd think.

martinP
Explorer
You can mitigate chromatic aberration with an achromat lens which is basicaly two lenses from different materials very close together. The CA is proportional to Abbe number which is particularly bad for plastics, but glass would be heavier of course ...

KuraIthys
Honored Guest
It's been mentioned that the chromatic abberation can be corrected for in software in a similar way to the screen warping used for similar reasons.

However, it appears to still be a work in progress, because the calculations are more complicated than the warping produced by the lenses.

I think as the SDK matures we will eventually have corrections for this as well, which should help regardless of the lenses.

The resolution issues however, probably aren't going to improve until the hardware does.

jwilkins
Explorer
I'm a little confused perhaps, but wouldn't correcting for chromatic aberration just be a matter of having 3 sets of coefficients instead of 1? Certainly the computations are "more complex", but they aren't anything compared to what shaders normally do.

The current computations are just a Taylor series approximation of barrel distortion. One good thing about the computation is that LED displays only produces 3 wavelengths of light. From a natural light source you'd have to produce a continuous correction, but for a computer display you only have to deal with 3 colors.
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martinP
Explorer
I guess that trying to correct CA in sw would necessarily leads into decreased brightness of the resulting image. But the display is probably bright enough, it should not be a problem.

jwilkins
Explorer
I do not think it would decrease the brightness. There will still be the almost exactly the same number of red, green, and blue sub-pixels each lit with the same intensity. You'd just be moving them slightly.

EDIT: I do see another potential problem though. Color artifacts cause by each color component getting aliased by the warp shader in different ways.
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edzieba
Honored Guest
You can do some correction in software. However, when the aberration is at a subpixel level (and when the pixels appear as large at they do at the periphery, this is still noticeably large), you can only do so much at the pixel level to correct it.

CoryandStuff
Explorer
It would be awesome if we had an option to choose between a normal/standard Consumer Version Rift and one that has a much better screen and lenses but with a steeper price.
This way anyone could afford a Rift but there would also be a version for people who want the most out of their experience. Maybe we could have a poll to see what everyone thinks about it?

Supraman321
Honored Guest
Thanks for posting the pictures! That helps a lot for showing just what to expect and IMO it really isn't all that bad. Certainly was getting a little nervous while waiting for my kit to arrive especially after hearing some negativity but I don't think it looks like it will ruin the experience by any stretch. Whew, back to just being excited for it to arrive :geek: .

Agree though that having multiple tiered versions of differing cost screens would be great when it comes time to have consumer models. A couple of defined minimum hardware requirements wouldn't be too overly complex to setup and allow for consumer education on Rift and Rift Plus models.