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."

Comments

Re:Transparent OLED

[ensignyu]

Then it'd be Augmented Reality (AR), not Virtual Reality (VR).

Resolution is not the hard-to-solve problem..

[mgemmons]

Display resolution is not the hard-to-solve problem. This quote from John Carmack sums it up best:

The latency between the physical movement of a users head and updated photons from a head mounted display reaching their eyes is one of the most critical factors in providing a high quality experience. Human sensory systems can detect very small relative delays in parts of the visual or, especially, audio fields, but when absolute delays are below approximately 20 milliseconds they are generally imperceptible.

According to the article

[...]the latest GameFace SDK significantly reduces latency to a point that it is easily comparable to the DK1. The company plans to benchmnark their latency soon to get a quantitative latency figure.

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.

Re:Resolution is not the hard-to-solve problem..

[Immerman]

I think that's exactly what they said. Resolution is an easy problem to solve. Lots of high-res screens out there. Latency is a far more challenging problem as it involves the entire system from head tracking, to rendering, to projection. And even just for the screen's contribution to latency, refresh rate is only a small part of the equation. A 60Hz panel refreshes 60 times per second (~17ms), but there may well be substantial internal latency between receiving the new frame and actually updating the image.

Think HD TVs where the refresh rate may be even higher at 120Hz, or even 240Hz (4ms), but you may see several hundred ms of latency between when an image change is sent to the TV and when the change appears onscreen - hence the need to calibrate the Rock Band, etc. timing-based games to your TV. That latency is mostly in the image-processing circuitry rather than the screen itself, but it illustrates the point.

And then there's ghosting to consider as well - just because the screen refreshes once every 17ms doesn't mean the previous image is completely gone yet, you may actually see the "remains" of several previous frames on screen at any given time, especially where there's sharp changes in brightness. And that latency in removing previous images can be nauseating as well, even when gaming on a normal monitor.