Hacker News Reader

Comment by nomel | Hacker News Reader

You can set the focus wherever you want. For the Quest 2, it's 1.2m [1], for most comfort at arm length. The future is varifocal systems though, since we use focus/depth of blur to judge size [2]. That's a really neat talk. As said there, you want the focal distance to be the same as the object, for least disagreement.

1. https://twitter.com/id_aa_carmack/status/1371485209603022853

2. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=YWA4gVibKJE

View on HN

> since we use focus/depth of blur to judge size

I’ve come to the conclusion that this is the factor holding back VR for me. I just don’t feel immersed and everything feels kind of flat and small. Hard to describe.

Yeah, distance gets confusing. Things don't seem as big as they should.

But, I found a workaround for this. In VR chat, I walked around several worlds with my characters forward movement speed set to the same as my treadmill. Slowly (a mile or so), the worlds became huge, it was really surreal. It fixed the scaling for everything, and it lasted about a day afterward. Mountains were distant and huge. Buildings looked far away. It was a significant change.

I get this on flat monitors actually. Sometimes I'll come home from a day of being outside, and it's really really clear that it's just a picture on a screen, and it feels really flat, small and hard to immerse in. But usually I can feel like I'm basically in the world, with a good sense of scale and depth.

It makes me think that perhaps it's not physical but an internal interpolation occurring. I am way out of my depth in that discussion, but it feels like a suspension of disbelief but for interpreting visual input.

Things seeming like they are the wrong size is usually a sign of incorrect calibration for inter-pupilary distance.

Adjusting IPD is really annoying at times. Probably one of the main reasons I pushed for auto IPD in our feature set.

I had a huge struggle debugging an issue on HoloLens that turned out to just be mis-calibrated IPD.

Unbeknownst to myself, a coworker had ran the calibration on himself the night before and when I got the device back, suddenly all my graphics of 3D models overlapping real-world objects looked "wrong". Every time I tried to visually adjust the registration of the model to the object, it would be completely unaligned in the z-axis with respect to my view when I performed the alignment. Midway through debugging, I tried adjusting from multiple angles to get the model absolutely centered on the object, which then made it look like it was swimming in the air whenever I walked around it.

I started to think there was something wrong with the device tracking, so I went through every calibration process on the device. I left IPD for last because I was used to working in VR where it doesn't really matter all that much, so I didn't expect it to be that important. IPD calibration on the original HoloLens was also a gigantic pain in the ass, as it took well over a full minute if clicking on objects with that interminable "air tap". Suddenly everything locked into place and was rock solid.

Immediately bought IPD measuring tools, had my own measurements confirmed by my optometrist, and it's now the first thing I check on every new headset. Every auto calibration system I've used regularly gets my IPD be wrong by +-5mm. I don't know if that's a significant difference (it's almost 10%, so seems like it), but I don't take any chances anymore.

Not sure how other headsets do IPD, but with eye tracking it's pretty hard to get it wrong. If the eye's off center it's easily noticeable in the image.

I have a friend with perfect vision, and he has trouble seeing things in video games on a flat screen. I have an eye that does not participate in the general effort, and so I don't have true binocular vision, yet I've always had great hand-eye coordination both in real life and in games, and never had motion sickness. I quietly theorize that this is because I use a multitude of other cues to judge distance, not the "6th sense" of depth that binocular vision provides.

I would love to hear how other people experience sensing depth as it's a really fascinating topic, I have no idea what it's supposed to be like. Do you find you 'feel' depth, like if a ball were coming toward your face does it give you a feeling of something speeding toward you?

Yeah, it kind of sucks that every current VR headset has a focal range somewhere between 1.3 and 2m (depending on which headset.) I wish there was some kind of aftermarket lens swap to make that infinity; it would make things like Space Engine in VR way more impressive I think.

Infinite focal distance isn't really doable with the space constraints you have in a headset. We tried, it massively increases complexity for no real gain.

Was there a perceivable difference when looking at something at hand length and "infinity"?

Reply on news.ycombinator.com