Douglas Lanman
2 HN recommenders · recommended in 4 months, 2014–2018
5:24 · 89K views · Jul 16, 2013
A SIGGRAPH 2013 demo from Douglas Lanman and NVIDIA of near-eye light field displays, which allow much thinner head-mounted displays that still show accurate focus and depth cues.
HN cites it in Magic Leap and VR threads as a clear overview of how light fields could solve focus and bulk problems.
6 comments from Hacker News
Watch this video at the 4 minute mark: this video It explains what they're talking about. Your eyes can focus on different parts of the view - it's not just an infinite depth-of-field display like we're used to. It's like the display version of a Lytro camera.
Here's the video associated with the Nvidia paper on Near-Eye Light Field Displays linked elsewhere in the comments. this video It gives a very clear overview of the concept and prototypes.
They're comparing apples to oranges. The $80,000 military VR headsets of 1989 absolutely did not use OLED or OLED light field displays. They've only recently been available from manufacturers at any price with their current pixel density and refresh rate (OLED has always had amazing response time, but refresh rate has been lacking until recently) specifications. Even the most expensive research OLED panels with high enough pixel densities for VR have only existed since the early-mid '00s. The studies he linked to are from 1989. > Depth perception The author neglects to mention that OLED light field displays have already solved this problem completely. See this video The technology already exists (you need a pair of expensive MicroOLED displays and some special lenses), it's just not available at a consumer price point. > Momentum For someone involved with military devices, it's surprising that this guy has never heard of galvanic vestibular stimulation. GVS will never be easy and will always require very, very extensive calibration per-user, but it's still possible to use for simulating perceived movement. This isn't that important for me personally, as I've never experienced VR sickness even when playing fast-paced high-momentum VR games for multiple hours at a time. I could see people who get VR sickness wanting this, as GVS would help prevent it from happening.
What about Near-Eye Light Field Displays[1][2]? From what I've seen those look to have promise in solving some focus problems and some of the problems with how cumbersome most VR/AR displays are. As a bonus, they can correct for prescriptions. 1: this video 2: [LINK]
I'm still waiting for more info on Near Eye Light Field devices.[1][2] Actually, it appears there's more on this now[3][4], but the video's audio is a weird translation of some paper or something. 1: [LINK] 2: this video 3: [LINK] 4: [LINK]