Slashdot Mirror
210 Degree VR Headset With 5K Display Revealed By 'Payday' Developer Starbreeze
An anonymous reader writes: Starbreeze Studios has taken wraps off of StarVR, a new VR headset with dual displays comprising a 210 degree horizontal field of view with a total resolution of 5120x1440. The headset's origins come from InfinitEye, a company working on a super-wide dual-display headset back in 2013, which went into stealth mode for quite some time before being reborn as StarVR in partnership with Starbreeze Studios. The studio is the developer behind the Payday franchise, Brothers: A Tale of Two Sons, and now Overkill's The Walking Dead, which will have a VR component utilizing the new headset.
With eyeball rotation of about 90 (head rotation excluded, peripheral vision included), horizontal field of view is as high as 270
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Human_eye
This is easy enough to confirm. Although not quite 270 degrees, I can sit with my head facing my computer monitor, and turn my eyes enough to see things about ~30 degrees behind me without strain. The field of view with eye movement is noticeably larger than 180-190 degrees.
Is your Intel Iris GPU driving a 4K, 2D desktop at 30fps or a 4K, 3D modern game at 30fps?
Get free satoshi (Bitcoin) and Dogecoins
20/20 vision is defined as the ability to distinguish a line pair spaced 1 arc-minute apart, or two pixels per arc-minute. 210 degrees is 12600 minutes, so this thing would have to be 25200 pixels across a 210 degree field of view in order to be good enough so you can't see the pixels. We're about 1/5th the way there (measured as linear resolution). In terms of apparent pixel size, this thing (24.4 pixels per degree) is roughly equivalent to viewing a 50" 1080p TV from 24 inches away.
Incidentally, this is why I don't mind the increases in phone screen resolution, and why I don't think graphics cards are fast enough yet. Yes the resolution is excessive for use on a phone. But manufacturers are using it as an excuse to fund R&D into higher res screens which will one day be useful for VR overlay displays built into things like Google Glass and Microsoft HoloLens. And we're going to need low-power graphics cards to drive those high-resolution screens with virtual 3D images, so there's still a ways to go in improving those as well.
And for those of you saying you're not interested in a VR headset, the biggest impediment to the miniaturization of mobile computers right now is the screen. If you've ever taken apart a tablet or a phone, the electronics mostly fit into a thin PCB about the size of a ball point pen. People want a bigger-than phablet screen on their phones, but they don't want to carry something that big around in their pockets or purses. The obvious solution is to move the screen closer to the eye, like Glass or HoloLens. Then the display can cover the same angular field of view as a HDTV viewed a few feet away, but be much smaller in linear size than even a smartwatch. Moving the screen closer to your eye also increases the effective brightness, reducing the lighting requirement thus allowing you to use it all day with a smaller battery. My guess is this screen size problem will be solved either with VR-style glasses displays, or flexible screens which can roll up into something the size of a pen when not in use.