Ever wondered why companies are not simply all making 200 degrees FoV headsets? Here’s an awesome technical video discussing the state of VR lenses, all problems that we’re currently facing and where we’re heading to in the future:
Great video.
Good to see the VR2 get a mention even if it’s 3 years away.
Unless some one comes in with a 140FOV headset Pimax could get another free pass with the 12k. If it’s actually 12k. Lol
Art from Hypervision really needs the backing he deserves to push his lenses to the masses.
I’m not sure what’s stopping Hypervision putting a 2.5” LCD display in a HMD with LH tracking and display port. Surely it’s easy by now.
Also I wonder why Valve didn’t buy Hypervision. Or any other big tech giant for that matter. They all must have their own solutions lined up which makes me optimistic for the Index2.
Somnium worries me as the delays in the VR-1 could mean it’s superseded before it hit mass production.
Varjo and HTC who already have great headsets with the Aero and Focus 3 only have to make a small upgrade to knoch them ahead of the Crystal and VR-1.
It really is a dog eat dog world when it comes to VR at the moment and unless you’ve got a unique selling point you’re never going to get the sales to keep your company afloat.
If Somnium are giving 3 years for the VR-2 then I’m sorry but that’s too late. I don’t think the VR-1 will sell that well to keep Somnium in the game unless they do what every one else seems to do and sell out to third parties. Pimax, Varjo and Somnium are all on borrowed time because they never sell enough HMDs to recoup the investments and end up on round C, D or even E funding.
To survive you need to be ahead of the Quests and Indexes and that’s a tough call because they can afford to take their time and soak up the losses.
The whole VR industry needs wide FOV below 1k to get rid of the goggle box and ignite mass interest. No one wants the feeling of claustrophobia and retention after the initial 90-100 FOV wow fact goes off a cliff.
The day Palmer Lucky sold out to FB for me will go down as the biggest loss in VR History.
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Heh, I recall posting: “IOI just bought Gregarious” on the old Oculus forums, on the day. 
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Yeah but you forget that while neither Varjo or Vrgineers really sell to consumers they have service support contracts with their B2B clients for years forward. So this really pads their pocket. Then there are the sales to prosumers though re-sellers that we likely will never see more info on. I have not checked if they release any sales figures publicly but suffice it to say that they are financially in a good spot from business contracts alone.
I think thats where the profit is now. But if volumes increase then the BOM cost comes down. As long as new tech isn’t thrown into the mix like Apples Vision Pro basic HMDs should stick to around the Sub $1k mark.
Imagine if the 8KX was a success and became the norm, it would actually be a cheap headset by now and Pimax would be the primary seller of PCVR heasets. Haha.
I suppose its like oil, pump less and let the price go up. Pump more and saturate market and become a houshold name.
In reality I reckon in 20 years we’ll see VR like TV’s, dominated by LG, Sony Panasonic and Samsung.
lol, yeah when the other patents expire.
But I agree if Pimax were to become a more dominant market leader we could see more products go down the high fov route. Right not that seems to go by the wayside, since most seem to be concerned with size reduction and more pixels.
Pancake lenses are cool for their ability to give that edge to edge clarity, but the fact that it has 75% light loss because of polarization, just gets amplified by the fact that you’re already using LCDs that themselves have low light efficiency because of polarization.
So If you have quest 2 And 3 side-by-side Quest 2 will look brighter.
If the industry does choose to continue with pancake and holocake optics we are going to need much brighter LCDs.
The only way to make that tenable is with lasers and phospors like you find in Dolby pulsar displays, BMW headlights, etc…
That’s gonna be the only way that you can claw back some of the brightness loss as well as keeping LCDs energy efficient.
While OLED Is awesome in certain ways, even the brightest of them will lose about 50% of their brightness after five years. It’s just the nature of being in organic display.
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I think that has more to do with restrictions being an AIO.
Not really, because BSB for example is not trying for the AIO field at all same with those LG goggles nvm its these guys Panasonic/MeganeX? It is just that everyone saw the great success Oculus is having and they want a piece of that pie, when in reality VR is quite a segmented space and currently people buy the headsets that fit their playstyle/budget. So when taking that into consideration there is a nice market to be carved out where you can cater to the other side of folks who want above all more FoV and less distortion rather than pure pixel power and the ability to game on the go. I suppose that is where Hypervision is trying to go.
I think for tethered HMDs a laser based solution could be quite viable but since so many are now AIO devices battery life is a must and as such because none of the manufacturers seem to want to try new cooling tech, such as thermal vias in pcb, no new pcb substrates, and micro-channel direct chip cooling via a closed loop phase change setup it means fans are still the way to keep all that heat at bay and with lasers you add even more heat into that setup which means additional weight for cooling and more power draw.
But I am not sure that pushing more light through the LCD is really the solution, perhaps QLED/mini-LED w/local dimming is the way to push additional brightness while getting closer to true OLED blacks if we want to stay with that panel tech.
In my mind I actually think near eye displays would benefit more from a retinal projection setup, because you would not need to rely on a pancake lens unless you really wanted to. Take a look at the Avegant Glyph as one such example it is quite small but the display brightness is almost blinding due to the fact that it is LED light being reflected off a Texas Instruments DMD chip. Place enough of these in a semi spherical orbit around the end user’s eye and then use a mems sensor to track iris position and you could make a display that covers the full 240 deg FoV but only gives you clarity where you look based on eye tracking and foveated render tech. These chips nowadays can support up to 8K res but realistically you could use something like 6 .75" 1080p chips per eye and you would see zero SDE.
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Mems is amazing tech. I have two of the anybeam MEMS projectors in an Nvidia surround set up for gaming.
CRT like motion clarity and 109 inches. I think that you could use MEMS for a cooling of lasers in a laser phosphor backlight and it would be better than mini LED for efficiency and way brighter.
They could get better brightness with a microlens array on the mini LEDs themselves.
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I’d love to know more about your setup if you have some time to DM?
Here is a video of it. Because it’s a scanning projector it has pretty bad geometry so you can see the gap between the two projections but it’s a Great way to play retro games and in this video I have doom three.
I had more videos up but they had Nintendo content in them and I didn’t want to get tagged
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