A glimpse of the VR future – Wireless, 4k, wide field of view and eye tracking

In 2016, virtual reality revolved around the introduction of the first VR glasses, such as the PSVR, HTC Vive and Oculus Rift. This year at CES we saw many companies trying to copy that success without inspiration. They are not implementing innovations and just want to get a piece of the emerging VR market: understandable, but not that exciting.

Much more interesting are the companies that look ahead and are concerned with the next steps in hardware. After all, we know that the development of virtual reality glasses is still in its infancy and there is room for improvement in many areas. Earlier this week we wrote about HTC, which introduced a Tracker for the Vive, and TPCast , which made a module to make the Vive wireless. Smaller companies also showed progressive developments at CES this year. In the past few days, we visited a number of them and we got a good idea of ​​what kind of technological improvements we can expect in the field of virtual reality in the coming years.

Sharper image thanks to 4k per eye

While we’re quite excited about all the VR glasses that have come out in the past year, it’s clear that there’s still a lot to be gained when it comes to image quality. The pixel density of the current screens is still low, so you see a kind of grid: the so-called screen door effect. Another point of attention is the limited viewing angle, which makes it look like you’re wearing a helmet.

The Chinese Pimax Technologies tries to solve both problems with its latest VR glasses: the Pimax 8k VR. As the name implies, the combined resolution of these glasses is 8k, or 4k per eye. That is considerably more than the resolution of current VR glasses and it produces an unmistakably sharper image. The screen door effect that we know from the current generation of glasses is clearly less on the Pimax 8k VR, although to our surprise it had not completely disappeared.

Driving glasses like these at 4k per eye requires an extremely powerful system, but fortunately that is not necessary to benefit from the extra sharpness. Even an upscaled 2k image looks a lot better on the Pimax 8K VR than on a Rift or Vive, because the pixel density of the screen is higher. Pimax uses LCD panels because OLED screens with such a high resolution are not yet available. We expected to notice something of that, in contrast and especially in ghosting, but that was not too bad. What stood out most were the reflections from the Fresnel lenses used when we didn’t put the glasses on quite straight at the beginning.

The Pimax 8K VR not only offers a higher resolution, but also a wider field of view. Just like with the StarVR , the screens are mounted at an angle, so you have a total field of view of 200 degrees, considerably more than the 110 degrees of the current generation of glasses. As a result, you have less the idea of ​​looking through binoculars or visors, which in turn contributes to a great gaming experience. The construction of the glasses is inspired by that of the PSVR, with the screens hanging directly in front of your eyes via a headband. In practice, we like that just a bit better than the design of a Rift or Vive.

So the demo we got with the Pimax 8K VR was convincing, but a lot is still unclear. To begin with, the company is currently low on capital and will therefore try to raise money through Kickstarter for mass production. There was still some vagueness about what it will bring to the market next. The glasses themselves will in any case cost less than five hundred dollars, but what you get with it is not yet clear.

For example, the company is working on controllers, but was only able to show 3D prints of concepts at CES. When we asked about the final shape, we were told that both Vive and Rift-style controllers should come out. And when we asked how the tracking worked, we again got the answer that there would be two systems. It must have partly had to do with the language barrier, but there also just seems to be a lot of unfinished or decided.

It is abundantly clear that it is technically possible to make VR glasses with a higher resolution and wider viewing angle than we are used to, and that is good to see. Major players such as HTC and Oculus are certainly already working on this in their R&D labs and it must be very crazy if they don’t want to make a big leap in resolution and field of view with the next generation of glasses.

Eye tracking for better performance and more realism

In a completely different corner of the fair, we found a company that wants to contribute to the image quality of VR glasses in its own way: Fove. It showed a prototype of VR glasses with infrared cameras that can register exactly what the user is looking at. With that information, a VR experience can be made just that little bit more realistic. For example, we were presented with a demo in which a robot walked towards us through a long corridor. When we looked at the robot, it was sharp and the background was slightly blurred. When we looked at the background, it was just the other way around, just like in real life. The effect was exaggerated for the demo, but it showed that the eye tracking is quite accurate.

Thanks to this eye tracking, considerable savings can be made on the amount of calculation work. By using foveated rendering it is possible to render the areas at the edges of the field of view at a lower resolution; only what you’re looking at is completely in focus. We also received a demo of this and the result was convincing, in the sense that as a user you don’t notice that the corners are blurred. According to Fove employees, the current implementation saves about sixty percent on the required GPU power. If the implementation were to happen in the graphics driver, something it is eager to persuade AMD and Nvidia to do, the savings could increase further.

Although Fove will soon market its own headset and SDK, it is not the intention to compete with other VR glasses. The current hardware is purely intended to demonstrate the technique. The ultimate goal is to license the technology, both hardware and software, to manufacturers such as HTC and Oculus in the hope that future generations of their VR glasses will be equipped with it. We can only hope that this works, because it really adds to the experience and lowers the threshold in terms of system requirements. The people behind Fove also said that the costs for the screen in the devkit were remarkably low; something with a large stock of 5.7″ AMOLED screens that has recently been left over.

Hands and feet

We’ve written it many times before; the more you become physically involved in a VR experience, the more immersive it is. We have been seeing all kinds of products at CES for a number of years that should contribute to this, with varying effects. For example, several companies are working on treadmills on which you can walk in any direction. Because you as a user have to stay in place, you hang in an uncomfortable harness and the experience just doesn’t come close to real walking. We don’t get very hot.

This year we came across another variant: VR sandals. These are equipped with different actuators and can therefore provide haptic feedback to your feet. At least, that’s the idea. The demo we were able to do consisted partly of a long path with different types of surfaces, for example stone, grass and snow. While we felt a difference in what the shoe did, it didn’t actually feel like a specific surface. In addition, the sandals were heavy, uncomfortable, and did not respond well. The hand controllers we could use with it weren’t much better.