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A 2560x1440 VR Headset That's Mobile
New submitter oldmildog writes: "GameFace Labs may very well be the furthest along in the quest to create a mobile VR headset. It's based on Android, and their latest prototype is the first VR headset (mobile or tethered) to include a 2560x1440 display, with 78% more pixels than 1080p based VR headsets like the Oculus Rift DK2. CEO Ed Mason said, 'The upgrade to 1280 x 1440 per eye is monumental. Individual pixels are hard to detect at first glance, making it a more immersive and comfortable experience in every single game and experience that we've tried. A lot of the ‘presence’ described by devs at the Valve [prototype VR headset] demonstration can be attributed to their use of higher resolution (and lower persistence) panels, which has a noticeable impact in suspending disbelief and tricking the brain."
I hope they get $1Bn too :)
their latest prototype latest
As opposed to their latest prototype earliest?
I purchased the Oculus due to its Kickstarter campaign.
Very disappointed with Facebooks interference, but if that will cause some others to come forward with a better design, I am all for it.
I have banked the funds I had for the Oculus 2 and will be looking toward the GameFace system when it becomes available.
is like a virus that's spreads everywhere, oculus got infected too - RIP
These things really aren't going to hit their stride until they start using Transparent OLED displays so instead of cloaking you in VR it's overlays info on the real world.
I would think that a major concern would be making vr gear as light as possible, making it mobile would mean that you have to include a battery making it unnecessarily heavy. This may seem silly at first, but trust me, if you're going to be wearing it for any period of time every little bit of weight matters.
Also, running out of battery in the middle of my vr session would get pretty old after a while.
The resolution seems great though and should they decide to make a tethered version I'd be interested.
I don't think this headset is first. I think I recall palmer or cormack talking about 4k when they discussed the headsets they tried prior to developing the rift. That 4k was one of the requirements for some defense application. I suppose this might be the first prototype 2.5k display whose parts cost less than 10 grand.
According to the article
Notice that is DK1 latency, not DK2. DK1's latency was notoriously bad and made many people nauseous. So, while I'm happy to see competition in this space, as far as GameFace is concerned, there is not a lot to see here yet.
I had to manually build a laptop (T60p/T61 parts) to get a screen with that resolution on a laptop. Argh! There's no real point to this post. I'm just complaining about how high mobile screen resolutions are compared to laptop and desktop screens. If only CRTs weighed less.
"Mobile VR Content."
That's like saying "Supercharged smartcar."
It doesn't make any sense. It's a lot of work put into something incredibly stupid. What's the point of having a minimum of 60fps 3D content at a 1440p resolution when you are running on a mobile chip? That'... that's just... dumb. That's not dumb. That's idiotic, it's pointless.
Besides, it's easy to tell the overhyped article is just bull. "It's almost hard to notice the pixels!" At that resolution per eye right on your face the relative screen resolution would be just above playing the original Doom at 320x240. So, yeah, thanks for the lies.
Resolution is pretty much everything with VR headsets. The only problem I see with this headset is that it won't have much content for a long time. Unless they can port CryEngine 3 for example, there won't be a copy of Star Citizen running on it. It's big-name PC titles that are going to drive VR. This headset needs to support getting content from a PC. Not just it's own Android based content.
what is different with this technology from the stuff 10+ years ago that companies dropped like a hot potato when they found out that besides giving adults constant headaches, that growing childrens eye-brain development was irrepairably damaged by constant use?
Im sure that the lawyers will be gleeful that these things will be coming back.
Keep facebook away from it.
I was on the fence about buying a DK2, but the Facebook purchase convinced me for sure I should do so - because I want to own and program against a prototype of something that is probably going to deliver.
It's kind of dumb to back up a company that is not only still catching up to DK1, but also lacks the financial resources to even keep up with further Oculus advancement going forward.
There's a reason why Facebook bought Oculus and not one of the other VR wannabes. They are years behind.
As for "interference", what the hell are you talking about? There's been none so far, only speculation - the only known thing about interference is they have said there will be none.
"There is more worth loving than we have strength to love." - Brian Jay Stanley
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=G-2dQoeqVVo
I hate it when I have to bolt my VR helmet to the floor, now I can get a neck-ache with 78% more pixles while it runs on a phone that has about the same horsepower as a decade old computer!
the future is finally here!
Low motion latency (not above half the frame interval) is far more important than resolution. None of these headsets are there yet.
...at 1280x720 per eye, however Avegant is using DLP which won't have the screen door issue. It will be interesting to see which actually LOOKS better. Pixels aren't everything. Persistence and latency also matters. See DK1 vs DK2 for latency upgrade!
http://www.avegant.com/
Lol, Zuckerberg bought the wrong one.
It doesn't make any sense. It's a lot of work put into something incredibly stupid. What's the point of having a minimum of 60fps 3D content at a 1440p resolution when you are running on a mobile chip?
The iPad is already running complex games at 2048 x 1536 (close to 1440p). It's not hard to imagine you could do 120FPS (or faster) output of simpler scenes and interleave them between a screen over each eye...
Why? Well, what about airline travel for one thing. I personally would not mind shutting out the whole plane for a few hours and imagining for some reason I'm bound in a small chair on a beach somewhere.
"There is more worth loving than we have strength to love." - Brian Jay Stanley
and take my money!
Excellent idea making a headset with a Display that is HD-res or better per eye, however very bad idea including the computer in the headset too. I wish they would have just made it a display device that had good tracking.
With that kind of vapid, yet vehement trolling I half expected catmistake to suddenly "put on his robe and wizard hat" and start talking about how the *real* problem was due to not using his hosts file trojan.
What's "mobile" about it? Runs on batteries? Plays crappy cellphone games? No. It's cordless.
That's good, but it has nothing to do with mobile phones. Even GameFace uses the term "cordless", not "mobile".
The site is kind of vague on what processing takes place in the headgear, and what takes place on the external WiFi connected device where, presumably, the game is playing. This thing is only worth the trouble if the game behind it is rendering very fast and has very high resolution content, and the latency to the game is very low.
The resolution of these types of devices is a huge factor in whether or not I would find them acceptable to use, but the field of view they have is an even bigger factor. With very inexpensive monitors I can have a combined display that takes up a very large portion of my horizontal vision. I currently have three 24" monitors that give me a combined field of view of 123 degrees in their current configuration, with a 5760x1080 resolution also being a plus. Going to a VR headset with a FOV of only 90 degrees would be a step down as far as I'm concerned, and I would not take that step. The VR aspect of it, while cool in and of itself, would be a non-starter for me if the FOV was well below what I can do with monitors. Getting slightly bigger monitors, like 27" ones, would give me an even larger FOV, and alterations to their physical configuration can also change that FOV value and give me close to 180 degrees if I want.
As far as I'm concerned, if a VR headset isn't giving me something near/beyond a 180 degree FOV I really couldn't care less. I'd rather keep my head stationary and look at a display setup that does give me a larger FOV. Hopefully they get there soon, because everything else that goes along with the idea is pretty damn cool. But I don't want to look at an image where only a small portion of my vision is taken up. The immersiveness of a large horizontal FOV (vertical is less important to our vision, but would still be desirable) is too much to give up. I've lived with this setup for a couple years now, and wouldn't want to go without something similar/greater in FOV capability.
And here I feared for a second that Facebook killed VR.
This is good news.
but but but...
78% MORE PIXELS!
the preceding comment is my own and in no way reflects the opinion of the Joint Chiefs of Staff
Wow, that's neat, can I buy it and add to my existing collection of VR and AR gear I've been using since Quake and Descent came out about two decades ago?
I mean, I have mobile ready VR already, it's pretty cool, and doesn't have to look like I've strapped a toaster to my face... That high resolution is nifty, but how is it on battery life? That's the main thing for me, FoV isn't really that big of a deal since most receptors are concentrated in the center of your visual field anyway. Also, in my albeit limited studies, it's not lag-time but difference between visual and inner-ear inputs that primarily induces motion sickness, so any
I really do hope VR succeeds in the general public this time around. There really isn't much in the way of good 3DUI experiences, so I've been doing some 3D experiments in input / output. I love having a full 360 degree desktop full of text terminals, documentation, issue trackers, tool-bars, palettes, actor models, and widgets off to the side and out of the way of the workspace, etc. Unfortunately, I have discovered that with combinations of two or more [accelerometer | compass | head tracking | eye tracking] I can achieve a different yet cheaper, less strain inducing, nearly as immersive, and somewhat similar feature set to what VR provides, but using any standard 2D screen -- they become 3D viewports into a virtual landscape. Lean in and tilt the head slightly to view surrounding workspaces, combinations of vocal, keyboard, mouse, and eye blink / motion for intuitive (yet easily controllable) focus acceleration and action input, etc. Even my grandma was surprised and grinning saying, "Oh wow, I can actually use this. It's like an actual window. Why isn't this on my TV right now?" So, I think AI + cameras embedded in our devices will be strong competition for the VR market.
IMO, it is Augmented Reality (AR) that's really exciting. However, just like VR, there isn't much in the way of good UI design, and the wearable AR tech is still as expensive and clunky as the UI research itself remains... I have experimented with some brain-blowing concepts when combining my active display UI designs with wearable AR UI, but it makes some of my friends and family instantly puke -- unlike the active display itself, which doesn't induce nausea because it mimics something we're all familiar with, and aligns itself with our perception expectations by augmenting reality instead of enforcing a virtual reality. In other words, AR is not just for goggles anymore, and it's already better than VR in terms of IO ROI and monetary ROI, IMO, but YMMV w/ VR vs AR.
TL;DR: VR is still cool but gimmicky hype that's soon to be obsolete before it even gets off the ground, unfortunately.
From the article: "And while the lenses on their early prototypes were lifted from the Oculus Rift DK1, Mason tells me that new lenses and much more will debut with their latest prototype"
Again: "Mason tells me that the latest GameFace SDK significantly reduces latency to a point that it is 'easily comparable to the DK1.'"
Further: "I was playing the cult-classic Jet Set Radio (2000)"
So how is the GameFace more advanced than the Oculus again? They have yet to demo a product which doesn't use the Oculus's lenses. Their latency is on par with Oculus's first gen DK ... when Oculus is taking preorders on their second. And for the games they can demo, we're expected to get hyped up about games from 2000.
I'll admit that I am intrigued about the prospect of not being tethered to my computer. Still, I'm not sure that I want to be spinning in complete circles while wearing VR goggles. I don't want to trip on things and fall over while playing Portal. The "selling point" of this device seems to put a niche device into an even smaller niche.
Oculus are/were looking to bring a reasonably-priced viable VR display to the market. Facebook are a social media powerhouse which makes revenue by monetizing it's users' details for advertising purposes.
I'm not sure how other people though Oculus was going to have to make money in the long run, but if they thought there was ANY difference between those two things they are deluded.
With the Facebook integration it means Oculus has LESS of a need for ad revenue, not more. And Facebook has said they will remain hands off - which they have with Instagram.
With the Facebook purchase the Oculus is going to be a much purer form of what they were envisioning than it would have otherwise.
"There is more worth loving than we have strength to love." - Brian Jay Stanley
Can't wait for my Bike HUD headset with rearview camera, speed, gps, heart rate, RPM, and automated machine gun targeting display!
That will be SO cool!
So I can "see" through it without having to take it off.
What a silly oversight! Or are they constrained by patents?
it's not owned by Facebook.