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What it's like to spend 40-50 hours in VR every week

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Re: What it's like to spend 40-50 hours in VR every week

#11

Post by jiggawatts »

azinman2 wrote: post #8

Having a screen blast your eyes 2” away is only ok for so long. Perhaps some can handle this but I cannot possibly imagine this is good for most people at scale. There’s already concern about eye problems due to cell phones in youth, and that’s at least 6-10” away from one’s eyes and with other light coming in. The resolution isn’t there yet compared to my 4-5k monitors for text, but clearly will get there in the fut…

The physical distance from the glass to your eyeball is irrelevant.

What is relevant is the distance to the focal plane.

For typical screens, the focal distance and the screen distance are obviously identical.

For VR systems, they're very different. The last one I tried had a focal plane that was about 4 meters away. This makes it better than typical screens!

However, the low resolution is an issue. I've found that I get sore eyes if I use a low-resolutions screen. This is because my eyes try to focus, fail, and keep "hunting" by changing focus back and forth looking for the point of sharp focus -- but it's never there. This is why all of my displays are 4K.

For VR because of the large field of view, the required resolution is at least 8K per eye or equivalent. Ideally a "fake" 16K using foveated rendering.

Re: What it's like to spend 40-50 hours in VR every week

#12

Post by MarcelOlsz »

As someone who has spent quite some time tuning their VR setup for iRacing, I highly recommend the Pimax headsets (Pimax 8K X has dual native 4K). Best resolution and FOV, decently priced, light software, and surprisingly great support.

I 3d printed some supports to mount a vive headstrap to it, and removed the vive headphones in favor of Airpods. 200 degrees of FOV @ 75hz would be incredible for work with a far superior viewport than OP.

This blog post makes me want to give this a try.

Re: What it's like to spend 40-50 hours in VR every week

#13

Post by sp332 »

azinman2 wrote: post #8

Having a screen blast your eyes 2” away is only ok for so long. Perhaps some can handle this but I cannot possibly imagine this is good for most people at scale. There’s already concern about eye problems due to cell phones in youth, and that’s at least 6-10” away from one’s eyes and with other light coming in. The resolution isn’t there yet compared to my 4-5k monitors for text, but clearly will get there in the fut…

The focus issue is not that things are too close (as jiggawatts covers) but that the focal plane never changes. You might want to specifically do some eye exercises by focusing on objects at different distances outside of VR.

Re: What it's like to spend 40-50 hours in VR every week

#14

Post by [deleted] »

azinman2 wrote: post #8

Having a screen blast your eyes 2” away is only ok for so long. Perhaps some can handle this but I cannot possibly imagine this is good for most people at scale. There’s already concern about eye problems due to cell phones in youth, and that’s at least 6-10” away from one’s eyes and with other light coming in. The resolution isn’t there yet compared to my 4-5k monitors for text, but clearly will get there in the fut…

[deleted]

Re: What it's like to spend 40-50 hours in VR every week

#15

Post by smoldesu »

Meh, what the hell. Immersed has a Linux build, I've got a spare headset, I decided to give it a whirl. While I'm a little disappointed by how little input the controller affords me, I'm impressed with how well it works! You've got my attention, but not my 40-50 hours a week... Yet.

Edit/disclosure: corrected a typo I made while in VR

Re: What it's like to spend 40-50 hours in VR every week

#16

Post by bowmessage »

caslon wrote: post #9
bostonsre wrote: post #6

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I don't think oculus works well outdoors.

It's... complicated. It works, but there's a near-certain chance you'll eventually burn the display through the lenses if you do it wrong. It's the same reason you shouldn't leave any VR headset laying beside a window without a cover. The tracking is fine, but you'll probably end up re-buying a headset on a monthly basis if doing it.

Ah. So the issue is catching stray sunlight through one of the lenses and having it focus onto / burn the display? If that's avoided, are there other issues to worry about?

Re: What it's like to spend 40-50 hours in VR every week

#17

Post by caslon »

azinman2 wrote: post #8

Having a screen blast your eyes 2” away is only ok for so long. Perhaps some can handle this but I cannot possibly imagine this is good for most people at scale. There’s already concern about eye problems due to cell phones in youth, and that’s at least 6-10” away from one’s eyes and with other light coming in. The resolution isn’t there yet compared to my 4-5k monitors for text, but clearly will get there in the fut…

> Personally it makes me feel a bit nauseous, particularly if there’s any movement (I get motion sick easily in VR but not normally in real life). My understanding is that about 20% of the population is like this and nothing is known to prevent it.

This is almost always one of two things:

* A low or unsteady framerate or tracking

* Lack of spending twenty minutes in it to teach your body to cope with the aforementioned low or unsteady framerate or tracking

The Quest 2 won't drop below 90hz if in any productivity app, and you can even turn it up to 120hz (it can handle games at 120hz; a productivity app won't put any stress on the hardware), so there isn't really the opportunity for nausea.

It really does sound like you've only used Cardboard or Daydream, since the only thing you're listing is Street View. There's nothing wrong with Cardboard and Daydream, but they're 3DoF and you were lucky if it would hit 60hz consistently. They're a box for nausea. Even the original Vive (still an admirable headset, although pretty rough these days) is significantly below the state of the art enough that judgements about VR as a whole can't justifiably be made.

Re: What it's like to spend 40-50 hours in VR every week

#18

Post by Retric »

jiggawatts wrote: post #11
azinman2 wrote: post #8

Having a screen blast your eyes 2” away is only ok for so long. Perhaps some can handle this but I cannot possibly imagine this is good for most people at scale. There’s already concern about eye problems due to cell phones in youth, and that’s at least 6-10” away from one’s eyes and with other light coming in. The resolution isn’t there yet compared to my 4-5k monitors for text, but clearly will get there in the fut…

The physical distance from the glass to your eyeball is irrelevant. What is relevant is the distance to the focal plane . For typical screens, the focal distance and the screen distance are obviously identical. For VR systems, they're very different. The last one I tried had a focal plane that was about 4 meters away. This makes it better than typical screens! However, the low resolution is an issue. I've found that…

Focal distance is only part of the issue another is is consistency. Using a headset for 8 hours means your eyes are constantly focusing within a very narrow range of distances for 8 hours which isn’t good. Your brain might be somewhat fooled when looking at a wall vs a VR window, but your eyes don’t change focal distance.

Similarly VR has a narrow range of possible brightness, this is less of an issue but can also cause problems long term.

Re: What it's like to spend 40-50 hours in VR every week

#19

Post by Ancapistani »

caslon wrote: post #9
bostonsre wrote: post #6

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I don't think oculus works well outdoors.

It's... complicated. It works, but there's a near-certain chance you'll eventually burn the display through the lenses if you do it wrong. It's the same reason you shouldn't leave any VR headset laying beside a window without a cover. The tracking is fine, but you'll probably end up re-buying a headset on a monthly basis if doing it.

FWIW, I fly FPV and am aware of this issue but haven’t had a problem with it.

I probably average about 4-6 hours per week outdoors in sunlight with my Skyzone 04X. It has dual OLED screens and a very similar (if smaller) form factor to my Quest 2.

I’d say it’s more a “be aware of this and be careful” problem than a “you’re going to break it once a month” problem.

Re: What it's like to spend 40-50 hours in VR every week

#20

Post by sp332 »

Elevr had some great research and blog posts about this kind of thing, but they ran out of funding and even the website is gone now. Here are a couple of my favorites:

The Office of the Future https://web.archive.org/web/20190816013625/http://elevr.com/...

The Three Scales https://web.archive.org/web/20190830025347/http://elevr.com/...

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