"On Oculus Rift and pretty much every other virtual and augmented reality experience, what the viewer sees is flat and floating in space at a set distance."
I was under the impression that the Oculus Rift had full stereoscopic 3d? Either I'm wrong or this article is wrong.
In the real world, your eyes refocus for objects at different distances. It's not just a "stereoscopic effect". The actual focus distance - what's blurry and what's not blurry - changes.
This doesn't happen with devices like the Rift or a 3D movie screen. Your eyes may have to swivel in and out to align the images, but they don't have to refocus.
Very different from the real world!
how is this different from refocusing?
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=uwCwtBxZM7g
It explains what they're talking about. Your eyes can focus on different parts of the view - it's not just an infinite depth-of-field display like we're used to. It's like the display version of a Lytro camera.
Light field displays are to the Rift like the Rift is to a 3DTV.
Other, non-screen based technologies, such as DLP [1] would allow the rendered field of depth to adjust based on the eye's focus, allowing the scene to be more realistic, and reducing mental fatigue. I think there was a different company using someting like this. [2]
[1] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Digital_Light_Processing
[2] http://kotaku.com/people-really-want-that-other-scary-cool-v...
So you might have fun wondering how to build something that doesn't work like that.
Ultra-High Resolution Scanning Fiber Display for HMDs
http://www.sbir.gov/sbirsearch/detail/415788
...Magic Leap is working to commercialize low cost, compact, high field of view, high resolution consumer wearable display systems.
A quick search for "Fiber Scanned Display" explains the technology:
http://www.hitl.washington.edu/projects/mfabfiber/
If they are building a new kind of 3d display then this may explain why they need a lot of money. They cannot just buy an already massmanufactured display like Oculus is buying it from Samsung.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=uwCwtBxZM7g
It gives a very clear overview of the concept and prototypes.
It allows you to focus on near objects, and focus on far objects. It's not an infinite depth-of-field display... You visually get to chose where you focus!
It's like the DISPLAY version of a Lytro camera! (I wonder if you could hook up a one to the other!)
This is amazing!
And then I heard he had upped and left to Florida with his family, which is a big change. He has the rap sheet [1] to do pretty much whatever he wants, so I took his move to Florida as a big sign that Magic Leap exists (moving to Florida is no joke, and he's not a pump-and-dump kinda guy) and whatever does exist is cool (he wants to build cool things, and there's plenty of that in the Bay Area).
https://research.nvidia.com/sites/default/files/publications...
On one hand, it's amazing to see that the boundaries of technology are moving so fast that someone could come along a year after Oculus makes big news with something that might blow them out of the water (according to marketing hype).
On the other hand, $500M for an unlaunched startup with no users is crazy. That money could be stretched so far in so many ways and it's being dumped into a company without a dime in revenue. There is clearly no attempt to be 'lean'. It's hard to believe that they really 'need' $500M to develop this new tech, they're not flying to space and they're not pushing a medical device through FDA trials.
I guess the best thing to do is sit back and watch.
1. Stereopsis - different image for both eyes.
2. Accommodation - ability of eye lense to focus on different distances.
3. vergence - eyes rotate slightly inward or outward so that the projection of an image is always in the center of both retinas
Modern 3d technology (movies, VR) provides only sereopsis without accommodation or vergence and vergence-accommodation conflict can cause headaches. You also notice that if you look at different part of the screen from where the movie camera is focused on, the image is blurry.
Conventional lens-screen technology (like Olucus Rift) can't solve these problems. You need something new like light field technology or hologram technology. This is why hundreds of millions if not several billions are needed to develop this technology.
Here's an article discussing the pros/cons of hard ar/see-through ar:
http://blogs.valvesoftware.com/abrash/why-you-wont-see-hard-...
It seems like it's still a very, very hard problem to solve.
http://trademarks.justia.com/owners/magic-leap-inc-2603519/
A lot of virtual reality comic book mash-up type stuff.
