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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
Meh. I would certainly rather get behind this than FB's Oculus Grift.
Look where all this talking got us, baby.
It's a virtual virtual headset!
Get free satoshi (Bitcoin) and Dogecoins
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 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.
There are now a few HiDPI choices in laptops. Writing this from my 3200x1800 laptop...
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.
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
There's also the question of what, exactly, the 'mobile' use case for something even harder on your situational awareness than a bag over your head...
Having lived through the era of 21+ inch CRTs, I certainly want any VR headset to be relatively lightweight(especially the part I attach to my face) and nobody likes dealing with devices that require three dongles, an external PSU, a processor box, and a couple of line lumps to operate, so my (perhaps naive) assumption would be that 'non-mobile' would still mean 'fairly lightweight thing you put on your head, probably with a smallish support box that takes the video inputs, handles the motion-tracking camera, if any, and either houses or is connected to the power supply'.
So, um, even the non-mobile units are going to be easy enough to toss into a (suitably protective) laptop bag, which makes them pretty 'mobile' for something that's dangerously useless when actually walking around.
I'm also a trifle baffled about the 'Android' element. What is based on Android? Did they drag a gratuitous smartphone/tablet interface into the firmware that handles location tracking and such because, um, some reason? Is this VR system tied directly to the output of yet another probably-doomed niche Android Gaming Product? I hope it has video-in for when that flops.
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!
For $2k you could get a 3.2k display laptop.
second hit on google: http://www.dell.com/us/p/xps-1...
Except I'm waiting for these guys to get sued into oblivion for copying Facebook's amazing groundbreaking invention.
How can I believe you when you tell me what I don't want to hear?
Low motion latency (not above half the frame interval) is far more important than resolution. None of these headsets are there yet.
It's a virtual virtual headset!
No, it's literally a virtual headset. Virtuous (or righteous)
I actually ordered a DK2 after the facebook announcement on the theory that it will be less likely to be broken by facebook than later models. It remains to be seen of course, but July is a pretty early timeframe for Facebook to have completely destroyed the company.
That reminds me of when I was shopping for bluetooth headphones
Some of them were advertised as 'portable'
I wouldn't want to wear anything on my head that wasn't portable.
(remember the Osbourne 1)
Lol, Zuckerberg bought the wrong one.
I don't know. You obviously couldn't do pseudo-realistic rendering at that resolution on a current mobile chip, but much more stylized rendering could be possible. Imagine walking through a 3D cartoon world - low detail, but with no obvious pixels to interfere with immersion or create obvious "jaggies"
--- Most topics have many sides worth arguing, allow me to take one opposite you.
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
It's virtually a real headset.
Sleep your way to a whiter smile...date a dentist!
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.
Who said anything about solid colors? Even gouraud shading would benefit from a bit more detail, and there's absolutely no reason you couldn't still do fully textured figures, just using smaller textures and a lot fewer polygons than in Crysis. Plus, even if most of the world were solid shaded colors you still have all the fine detail that would benefit from the resolution. Mouths, hair, stick figures, etc. Also things in the distance - I can't tell you how many games I've played where I've struggled to make out what the 4-pixel tall maybe-horror in the distance is. The difference between a 4 and 6 pixel height cannot be overstated.
--- Most topics have many sides worth arguing, allow me to take one opposite you.
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.
in the meantime : WHERE is my cheap 2560*1440 resolution monitor ? i want more than 1920*1024 !
Is this the point where I turn pedantic and remind you there is no such resolution as 1920*1024? =)
And I guess "cheap" is a relative term. I see the cheapest UHD (4K) monitors now costs less than what I payed for my 27"@2560*1440. The monitor(s) are such an important interface between you and the machine, this is where you should invest. I usually spend about 7000 NOK for a new monitor (atm. about US$1175. This being a high cost country, and with high taxes, this would be the equivalent of about US$850-900 in the US).
A new 28"@4K costs about US$600 and up here. A new 27"@2560*1440 costs about US$500 and up.
And here I feared for a second that Facebook killed VR.
This is good news.
Heck, I'm considering buying one of these 'VR' headsets for use for business purposes. If you've ever taken an 8-hour bus or train ride and tried to use a small laptop screen the whole way, it can be frustrating.
This thing has twice as many eye views as I need (future patent: slightly cross your eyes and interleave double resolution by shifting each pixel off by one for each eye), but the resolution is good enough.
My real preference would be for a bluetooth keyboard and to run my desktop off a cell phone form factor. Good thing the buses and trains have AC mains now.
My God, it's Full of Source!
OUTSIDE_IP=$(dig +short my.ip @outsideip.net)
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
I hope not. There might not be TV formats at that pixel count in use, but a display with these pixel counts seem entirely feasible, as they are integers ;-)
Allthough it does indeed seem feasable, and dare I even say probable, I must unfortunately disappoint you; there is no such thingamabob, dookickey or thingamajig.
Replying just to say that I posted the above without logging in by accident.
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.
The stuff at affordable prices (still double what VR headsets will go for when the Rift or Morpheus launch) 10+ years ago was high-latency, low-detail/resolution, low-precision, bulky, with a tiny depth of field. The units that solved some or most of those problems cost tens or hundreds of thousands of dollars.
The two biggest things today are the much higher amount of compute performance available, as well as the existence of modern smartphone displays (small, high-resolution, low-latency), which didn't exist ten years ago.
Trading the screen-door effect for the rainbow effect isn't a good trade-off. The screen-door effect can be solved by increasing display resolution and tweaking sub-pixel geometry (DK2 is a diamond matrix pentile-like display that reduces the screen door effect), while a single-chip DLP solution can't do much to improve on the rainbow effect short of cranking up switching speeds (which are already in the thousands or tens of thousands of hertz).
For what it's trying to do, which is to simulate big screen without having to carry around a big screen, the Glyph can put up with some rainbow effect. For VR, it's a death sentence.
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!
A new 27"@2560*1440 costs about US$500 and up.
I got my 27" 2560x1440 monitor on ebay for under $280 (shipped) a few months ago, prices seem to be a little higher now but not that bad. The ~109dpi gives a slightly smoother image also (24" 1080p is ~92 and 30" 2560x1600 is ~100). I hadn't noticed pixelation on my other monitors before but side-by-side it's easy. 4k@28" is overkill dpi-wise unless you're putting your face 6" from the monitor to get that surround feel :)
Unfortunately, I had to use .no prices, which are a bit steaper.
Here's an example from a price comparison engine in Norway. I've sorted by 2560x1440 and 2560x1600, and prices run from Low to High. Prices are in NOK:
http://www.prisguide.no/katego...
A rule of thumb for costs in Norway compared to the US is to say 1USD = 10NOK, that way you'll have figured in taxes and charges. The currency itself is currently around 1USD = 5.92NOK.
But when that is said, I am very happy with my Dell U2711.