Tag Archives: HMD

Head-mounted Displays and Lenses

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“It can’t be comfortable or healthy to stare at a screen a few inches in front of your eyes.”

The popularity of Google Cardboard, and the upcoming commercial releases of the Oculus Rift, HTC Vive, and other modern head-mounted displays (HMDs) have raised interest in virtual reality and VR devices in parts of the population who have never been exposed to, or had reason to care about, VR before. Together with the fact that VR, as a medium, is fundamentally different from other media with which it often gets lumped in, such as 3D cinema or 3D TV, this leads to a number of common misunderstandings and frequently-asked questions. Therefore, I am planning to write a series of articles addressing these questions one at a time.

First up: How is it possible to see anything on a screen that is only a few inches in front of one’s face?

Short answer: In HMDs, there are lenses between the screens (or screen halves) and the viewer’s eyes to solve exactly this problem. These lenses project the screens out to a distance where they can be viewed comfortably (for example, in the Oculus Rift CV1, the screens are rumored to be projected to a distance of two meters). This also means that, if you need glasses or contact lenses to clearly see objects several meters away, you will need to wear your glasses or lenses in VR.

Now for the long answer. Continue reading →

On the road for VR: Redwood City, California

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Last Friday I made a trek down to the San Francisco peninsula, to visit and chat with a couple of other VR folks: Cyberith, SVVR, and AltspaceVR. In the process, I also had the chance to try a couple of VR devices I hadn’t seen before.

Cyberith Virtualizer

Virtual locomotion, and its nasty side effect, simulator sickness, are a pretty persistent problem and timely topic with the arrival of consumer VR just around the corner. Many enthusiasts want to use VR to explore large virtual worlds, as in taking a stroll through the frozen tundra of Skyrim or the irradiated wasteland of Fallout, but as it turns out, that’s one of the hardest things to do right in VR.

Figure 1: Cyberith Virtualizer, driven by an experienced user (Tuncay Cakmak). Yes, you can jump and run, with some practice.

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On the Road for VR: Augmented World Expo 2015, Part I: VR

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I attended the Augmented World Expo (AWE) once before, in 2013 when I took along an Augmented Reality Sandbox. This time, AWE partnered with UploadVR to include a significant VR subsection. I’m going to split my coverage, focusing on that VR component here, while covering the AR offering in another post.

eMagin 2k×2k VR HMD

eMagin’s (yet to be named) new head-mounted display was the primary reason I went to AWE in the first place. I had seen it announced here and there, but I was skeptical it would be able to provide the advertised field of view of 80°×80°. Unlike Oculus Rift, HTC/Valve Vive, or other post-renaissance HMDs, eMagin’s is based on OLED  microdisplays (unsurprisingly, with microdisplay manufacture being eMagin’s core business). Previous microdisplay-based HMDs, including eMagin’s own Z800 3DVisor, were very limited in the FoV department, usually topping out around 40°. Magnifying a display that measures around 1cm2 to a large solid angle requires much more complex optics than doing the same for a screen that’s several inches across.

Figure 1: eMagin’s unnamed 2k x 2k, 80×80 degree FoV, VR HMD with flip-up optics.

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On the road for VR: Silicon Valley Virtual Reality Conference & Expo

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Yesterday, I attended the second annual Silicon Valley Virtual Reality Conference & Expo in San Jose’s convention center. This year’s event was more than three times bigger than last year’s, with around 1,400 attendees and a large number of exhibitors.

Unfortunately, I did not have as much time as I would have liked to visit and try all the exhibits. There was a printing problem at the registration desk in the morning, and as a result the keynote and first panel were pushed back by 45 minutes, overlapping the expo time; additionally, I had to spend some time preparing for and participating in my own panel on “VR Input” from 3pm-4pm.

The panel was great: we had Richard Marks from Sony (Playstation Move, Project Morpheus), Danny Woodall from Sixense (STEM), Yasser Malaika from Valve (HTC Vive, Lighthouse), Tristan Dai from Noitom (Perception Neuron), and Jason Jerald as moderator. There was lively discussion of questions posed by Jason and the audience. Here’s a recording of the entire panel:

One correction: when I said I had been following Tactical Haptics‘ progress for 2.5 years, I meant to say 1.5 years, since the first SVVR meet-up I attended. Brainfart. Continue reading →

On the road for VR: Microsoft HoloLens at Build 2015, San Francisco

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I have briefly mentioned HoloLens, Microsoft’s upcoming see-through Augmented Reality headset, in a previous post, but today I got the chance to try it for myself at Microsoft’s “Build 2015” developers’ conference. Before we get into the nitty-gritty, a disclosure: Microsoft invited me to attend Build 2015, meaning they waived my registration fee, and they gave me, like all other attendees, a free HP Spectre x360 notebook (from which I’m typing right now because my vintage 2008 MacBook Pro finally kicked the bucket). On the downside, I had to take Amtrak and Bart to downtown San Francisco twice, because I wasn’t able to get a one-on-one demo slot on the first day, and got today’s 10am slot after some finagling and calling in of favors. I guess that makes us even. 😛

So, on to the big question: is HoloLens real? Given Microsoft’s track record with product announcements (see 2009’s Project Natal trailer and especially the infamous Milo “demo”), there was some well-deserved skepticism regarding the HoloLens teaser released in January, and even the on-stage demo that was part of the Build 2015 keynote:

The short answer is: yes, it’s real, but… Continue reading →

Messing around with 3D video

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We had a couple of visitors from Intel this morning, who wanted to see how we use the CAVE to visualize and analyze Big Datatm. But I also wanted to show them some aspects of our 3D video / remote collaboration / tele-presence work, and since I had just recently implemented a new multi-camera calibration procedure for depth cameras (more on that in a future post), and the alignment between the three Kinects in the IDAV VR lab’s capture space is now better than it has ever been (including my previous 3D Video Capture With Three Kinects video), I figured I’d try something I hadn”t done before, namely remotely interacting with myself (see Figure 1).

Figure 1: How to properly pat yourself on the back using time-delayed 3D video.

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Fighting black smear

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Now that I’ve gotten my Oculus Rift DK2 (mostly) working with Vrui under Linux, I’ve encountered the dreaded artifact often referred to as “black smear.” While pixels on OLED screens have very fast switching times — orders of magnitude faster than LCD pixels — they still can’t switch from on to off and back instantaneously. This leads to a problem that’s hardly visible when viewing a normal screen, but very visible in a head-mounted display due to a phenomenon called “vestibulo-ocular reflex.”

Basically, our eyes have built-in image stabilizers: if we move our head, this motion is detected by the vestibular apparatus in the inner ear (our “sense of equilibrium”), and our eyes automatically move the opposite way to keep our gaze fixed on a fixed point in space (interestingly, this even happens with the eyes closed, or in total darkness).

Figure 1: Black smear. It’s kinda like that.

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On the road for VR: Oculus Connect, Hollywood

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After some initial uncertainty, and accidentally raising a stink on reddit, I did manage to attend Oculus Connect last weekend after all. I guess this is what a birthday bash looks like when the feted is backed by Facebook and gets to invite 1200 of his closest friends… and yours truly! It was nice to run into old acquaintances, meet new VR geeks, and it is still an extremely weird feeling to be approached by people who introduce themselves as “fans.” There were talks and panels, but I skipped most of those to take in demos and mingle instead; after all, I can watch a talk on YouTube from home just fine. Oh, and there was also new mobile VR hardware to check out, and a big surprise. Let’s talk VR hardware. Continue reading →

An Eye-tracked Oculus Rift

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I have talked many times about the importance of eye tracking for head-mounted displays, but so far, eye tracking has been limited to the very high end of the HMD spectrum. Not anymore. SensoMotoric Instruments, a company with around 20 years of experience in vision-based eye tracking hardware and software, unveiled a prototype integrating the camera-based eye tracker from their existing eye tracking glasses with an off-the-shelf Oculus Rift DK1 HMD (see Figure 1). Fortunately for me, SMI were showing their eye-tracked Rift at the 2014 Augmented World Expo, and offered to bring it up to my lab to let me have a look at it.

Figure 1: SMI’s after-market modified Oculus Rift with one 3D eye tracking camera per eye. The current tracking cameras need square cut-outs at the bottom edge of each lens to provide an unobstructed view of the user’s eyes; future versions will not require such extensive modifications.

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On the road for VR: Silicon Valley Virtual Reality Conference & Expo

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I just got back from the Silicon Valley Virtual Reality Conference & Expo in the awesome Computer History Museum in Mountain View, just across the street from Google HQ. There were talks, there were round tables, there were panels (I was on a panel on non-game applications enabled by consumer VR, livestream archive here), but most importantly, there was an expo for consumer VR hardware and software. Without further ado, here are my early reports on what I saw and/or tried.

Figure 1: Main auditorium during the “60 second” lightning pitches.

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