Right now the closest tech to do this would be something like WiFi - but the latency is high, and the typical home's WiFi network bandwidth (practically due to the vagaries of radio) is not sufficient.
A few reasons this is important:
- latency in VR induces motion sickness and operates on a different scale than we're used to for regular network communications. A 50ms lag in a 2D video game is acceptable, a 50ms lag in VR will cause nausea and vomiting. This is a domain where single-digit milliseconds matter a great deal for user comfort.
- resolution and refresh rate is everything - VR's viability in large part hinges on the resolution of the screens, which right now are somewhere between "poor" and "mediocre" - nothing so far has come close to replicating 20/20 vision. Moreover you need those screens to refresh far more quickly than a regular monitor - 60Hz doesn't cut it, 90Hz is basically the minimum. Streaming an uncompressed 8K stream at 90Hz over wireless requires more bandwidth than any existing standard can deliver. It's at the edges of our wired capabilities.
Of course you can compress the streams, but that not only degrades image quality (which matters a great deal when the screens are replacing your eyesight) but also injects additional latency into the whole affair.
It's theoretically possible - but would require developing a lot of custom tech that doesn't exist yet. It would also likely be highly sensitive to the exact particulars of the physical environment - one user may have a perfect experience while the other experiences so much packet loss/reduction in bandwidth that the whole experience is unusable.
Right now through either Oculus (Wireless) Link, or something like Virtual Desktop, you can totally stream content from a PC to the headset, but that comes with a big list of asterisks (easily observable if you look at any support channel for both products):
- Most people's WiFi sucks, the room they're in has poor signal, or their router is mostly shite. The experience is awful for them.
- Most people's PCs are not connected to their network by ethernet, which seems like a crucial part of getting a good experience.
- Even under ideal conditions configured by an enthusiast who groks the tech, frame drops are relatively common.
- Streaming is generally not possible at full-resolution due to bandwidth limitations. A wireless-first approach presents an additional barrier to one of VR's biggest stumbling blocks - as screen resolutions increase streaming cannot keep up.
So getting the setup to work well right now requires a pretty knowledgeable user. Even assuming we can improve on this, I will wager that "95% effective, visible degradation a few seconds at a time at random intervals" is enough of a problem to be a hard stop on mainstream adoption.
This is the hole VR is in generally - the tech is "good enough" for enthusiasts, but punishing to the mainstream.
Is that true? 802.11ad (wigig) should be able to handle it. https://www.networkworld.com/article/2172394/understanding-w...
Have you ever used a wigig dock? You plug everything into your dock (hdmi, usb, ethernet) and it all gets beamed to the computer. ~10 microseconds latency.
edit: I see another commentor mentioned its successor 802.11ay. Same thing applies, except that 802.11ad is a delivery from the past, not a future promise. we are already there.
Imagine some kind of game with rain where water is collecting on your lenses. You could render and compress the frame, send it over, and distort it further You could even render the first source at 60fps, and the rain at 120fps. Or the first image comes over at a lower resolution, is upscaled, and then the rain effect is rendered at full resolution. The same could apply to synthetic film grain. Compressing a more pristine image and then adding film grain later should allow for significant additional compressibility? Decoupling the rendering into two layers could possibly allow for more resolution and framerate tricks like this? Or even color space upscaling upon display? Would it be possible to send half the color depth in even frames, half in odd, and have a nn up color both frames to their original?
It removes any interactivity that require the user to move significantly. More than that, even for just typing/using peripherals the cable is constantly in the way.
My little Petzl headlamp doesn't mount the tiny 23g battery pack on the forehead due to balance and comfort concerns, I can't imagine the Simula fares any better!
We're considering offering a belt clip option, but I'm not sure it's worth it overall.
We push about 3.4 GByte/s (or 27.5Gbit/s) to our displays. Even a 26Gbit/s DP1.4a HBR3 link needs display stream compression for that. So a wireless link will absolutely need strong compression.
H.265 can push that to maybe (ballpark) 200Mbit/s, which is fairly feasible. But that will need to be evaluated and optimized for text quality and latency. Some googling suggests 100ms end-to-end latency as good. That's pretty high for VR, IMO.
[Edit: fixed the DP1.4a bandwidth)
H.265 might be slower, but EVC, especially LCEVC, is supposed to be about 30% lower latency encoding than H.264.
If I spend all the dough on an AIO headset PC and it turns out to be underwhelming or I just never fit it into my long-term usage, then I've got a $2k+ computer I never use. Just as I'd prefer to separate the monitor from a PC or the media player from a TV, I'd be a lot more eager to try a headset if it wasn't attached to its own expensive PC.
The communicate via fiber or wire to a light headset.