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Improved Image Quality For HMDs Like Oculus Rift
An anonymous reader writes "The combination of smartphone panels with relatively cheap and light-weight lenses enabled affordable wide-angle Head Mounted Displays like the Oculus Rift. However, these optics introduce distortions when viewing the image through the HMD. So far these have been compensated for in software by using post-processing pixel shaders that warp the image. However, by doing so a loss in image quality (sharpness) can be perceived. Now researchers from Intel found a way around this error by using different sampling for rendering, therefore potentially increasing the image quality of all current and future HMDs with a wide field of view."
Rather than applying barrel distortion to the final raster image, the researchers warp the scene geometry during rasterization. However, it currently requires ray tracing so it's a bit computationally expensive. Note that a vertex transformation can be used (with tessellation used to enhance the approximation), but the results are of variable quality.
Oculus Rift is one of the greatest products ever, and Ima let you finish, but this is even better for multi-monitor gaming.
At least Oculus Rift had identified and addressed the problem of distortion, even though their solution loses image quality. Multi-monitor gaming has been garbage for a decade because everyone seems content with horrific distortion at large FOVs.
I know, it's all a matter of screen placement and eye positioning. That's dumb. I want a wrap-around image. I want to aim a projector at each of three walls and have the result make sense.
If you've tried Fisheye Quake, you know it's hell on your system, and still doesn't look great. If this technique is at all performance, everyone needs to start shipping with support, and they need to start yesterday.
Yes, that means added cost and weight. Deal with it.
Sure, if you don't mind producing a headset that no-one wants to buy because it's too expensive, no one wants to use because it's too heavy, and no one wants to supports because of the first two things. Or, in other words, if you want to be a complete and utter failure.
"None can love freedom heartily, but good men; the rest love not freedom, but license." --John Milton
It's not a lens problem. The lenses are trying to correct for the fact that current games display 3D images meant for display on flat surfaces. The lense is there to distort to image and make it wrap around your eyes, but the portion of the image you're wrapping is distorted and lacking detail, even before the lens smears it across your peripheral vision. This is a method for making the initial image much better and full of data so that less aggressive smearing is necessary, and the per-smear image has more data in it to begin with.
I recommend an optics course as your very first step because no distortion of the image on the screen will correct for the failure of your eyes to form a sharp image. What you want could possibly be done with liquid lens technology, but it will take decades for that to be anywhere close to affordable for the large lenses needed in this application.