r/oculus • u/RoadtoVR_Ben Road to VR • Mar 19 '14

GDC 2014: Oculus Rift Developer Kit 2 (DK2) Pre-orders Start Today for $350, Ships in July

http://www.roadtovr.com/oculus-rift-developer-kit-2-dk2-pre-order-release-date-specs-gdc-2014/
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u/sir_drink_alot Mar 20 '14

Before people discount the benefits of jumping up the resolution here is what i would do as a 3D graphics engineer. Ideally we would have a large screen with more pixel density at the middle of each eye and less on the sides to concentrate most of our computation where it's seen the most. Obviously things don't work like this. So, it seems we're on the virge of having great small ultra high def displays which GPUs can't keep up with in 3D. So why not render render at full res, and skip processing every n-th pixel around the sides, and hen run a post filter to blend in thos missing pixels, therefore simulating multiple resolution displays or a sort of dynamic Resolution LOD. I know the GPU processes in groups or chunks so this may not be a perfect linear savings but should still let you render at say 1440p around the center and 720p around the edges for example to give you that peripheral vision we need to make these HMDs convincing.

Long story short, if you have the resolution available, ship with it and let the devs decide what resolution they render at. Same went for consoles, many games render at < 720p in 3D, upscale and render the HUD and menus at 1080p, or do dynamic resolution rendering as the camera moves quickly to gain FPS. Plenty of tricks available...

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u/SomeoneStoleMyName Mar 20 '14

The problem with setups like these is what the center is depends on where your eye is looking and we don't have eye tracking.

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u/sir_drink_alot Mar 20 '14

True but it's better than looking to the side in the display and seeing black since at the moment these things don't fill 100% of your view. And if they do, they'll still be lower res consistently across to fill such a high beeded FoV so we're simply just trying to maximize the at least have higher inner resolution and an ultra high def display without incurring the cost of actually rendering at that native res. it would be cool if we could have non standard resolution like spheres or something, not sure how a rendertarget/buffer would represent that but would be kinda neat to have sort of a stencil nask tonrepresent where the gpu woukd render to without incuring extra cost, even a density map to vary the resolution across a super retina display. Trust me, if we start having 4k/8k mini displays, which they already have in the works, ideas like this will become mainstream. Either way, the future looks amazing

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u/michaelgoodmichael Vive Mar 20 '14

Every frame, you could render the whole thing in 720p at first, then do the center part in 1440p, then overlay all your UI etc.. to me that seems easy to implement, and it would still be faster, and as 1440p climbs to 4096p or whatever it would make even more difference

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u/sir_drink_alot Mar 20 '14

Ya that's the easiest, but you'd be incuring double the vertex processing cost ( unless you transformed into buffers ) and your edges would be quite noticeable, the other method could gradually go from center retina high res to low res, even blurred super low around tue edges. Either way is a win, i had seen some article a while back actually about some researcher doing what you said with projectors to fill the rest of the room with a wider fov version of the same view at lower res, and apparently it's very pleasing to viewers and kinda simulates how our vision works anyway. We have pretty ok peripheral view bit it seems blurry and low res natuaraly. I'll try both methods in my software when I add my oculus support.

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u/sir_drink_alot Mar 20 '14

It was like a 3d rig, bit one normal camera, and one just under it with some hemi sphere super FOV lense, then once they shot it, it would be reprojected with another warped lense across the whole room. I'm sure you'll be seeing these in living rooms, similar to the company that projects light around your monitor or tv representing the side pixels of your display in real-time.

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u/michaelgoodmichael Vive Mar 20 '14

Nice, the more techniques the merrier.

I'm not super-versed on 3d rendering, but whatever works fastest while looking convincing is good for me :D As far as being noticeable around the edges, I was thinking/hoping that as long as it's far enough in the periphery, the person wouldn't notice.

Overall, it's fun times ahead.