IMAX demands are ridiculous, but Ars's claim that IMAX is merely used as an example of "something awesome" is dubious when high quality VR happens to provide a substitute for going to an IMAX theater.
This is why IMAX is annoyed: they understand that VR is a huge threat to their business. The reason watching a movie on a very large screen is better than watching it up-close on a small screen is that in the case of the large screen, your eyes can relax by focusing at infinity. With VR, you can effectively simulate an infinitely large screen infinitely far away.
> With VR, you can effectively simulate an infinitely large screen infinitely far away.
In theory.
But the "further" away you project the virtual movie screen, the higher the resolution of the VR headset needs to be to support it. And considering that VR screens are already an inch from your face (and thus require a high-ish resolution to just basically "work") we're talking about better-than-exist resolution screens for that form-factor.
I don't legitimately consider IMAX's business threatened by VR headsets in the next ten or so years, and even then we'll have to see how well people like wearing a VR headset on their face (which might hurt necks, feel uncomfortable, suck for glasses wearers, etc).
VR is better now than at any point in history. But people are pretending like it will definitely succeed. But Google already cancelled Google Glass (and, no, Google Cardboard isn't the same thing). This might be another "3D" flop all over again.
1) No, the resolution is a function of the solid angle taken by the screen. Yes, there needs to be an uptick in PPIs but 8000x10000 is basically a hard cap on what's necessary (corresponding to a field of view of 135x180 with a visual acuity of one arc minute). There are already prototypes doing 2000PPI so it'll be at most a few years.
2) It doesn't have to be clear that VR will succeed for it to represent a threat to IMAX's business.
It's worse than that due to aliasing effects. Remember your rods are not aligned on a strict grid so need more than one pixel per rod. And, the eye contains ~120 million rods, so ignoring motion your already at ~40k x 40k per eye. Assuming you’re not moving they screen around to follow they eye or projecting on the retina 'resolution' would cap out at around 10 billion - 1 trillion pixels per eye.
However, clearly you can get away with far less than that. But, the point where increasing resolution is not noticeable at some level is ridiculously high.
Aliasing effects as you don't get 1:1 pixel per rod alignment. Currently we use 16xAA and Sqrt(16) = 4. So, 11,000 * 4 ~= 40K. Though the density is not constant over the eye so that's probably low balling it a little bit.
I like with #1 how you start with the word "no" but then repeat back to me what I said. So we both agree, you need a higher resolution than we have today to clone IMAX in VR, and we won't get that unless VR takes off (as funding is needed to produce the screens). VR also has the weight X factor, how heavy is this prototype 2000 PPI screen? And much would one cost?
Both we agree on #1, we both said the same thing.
> It doesn't have to be clear that VR will succeed for it to represent a threat to IMAX's business.
I literally don't understand what it is you're trying to say.
If VR fails, it isn't a threat to IMAX business by definition. Something that isn't popular or doesn't exist cannot be a threat to something else.
No, you said it depends on virtual screen distance, mubard said it depends on solid angle. Mubard is correct and more relevant to the idea of "make the virtual screen larger and further away" which has an implied constraint where the solid angle is kept constant.
No one would argue that the coming gen vr devices are at the pixels per degree of IMAX, that's just wrong.
Edit: why are so many comments (particularly top level ones) down voted in this thread?
> No, you said it depends on virtual screen distance, mubard said it depends on solid angle.
No, I said it cannot do virtual screen rendering at lower resolutions. mubard agreed. The virtual screen would look terrible as you pulled back if the resolution wasn't high enough to support it (which I don't believe it is, yet).
"But the "further" away you project the virtual movie screen, the higher the resolution of the VR headset"
That is wrong, plain and simple. How far the movie screen appears in the VR headset has no impact whatsoever on pixelization and is purely a stereoscopic effect.
> How far the movie screen appears in the VR headset has no impact whatsoever on pixelization and is purely a stereoscopic effect
We're talking about rendering pre-existing video at those distances, so it absolutely DOES cause pixelation as fewer pixels are used to render the video content than its native resolution.
A lot of people calling me wrong seem to be under the odd mistaken impression that we're rendering some generic object far away, but the discussion is about display pre-existing video footage at a distance.
If the VR headset is 1080p and the video footage is 1080p, if you put it far away (i.e. it only takes up 50% or 25% of the VR headset's screen real-estate) then it obviously cannot be rendered using all 1080p of the video's original pixels (since many are in use on the VR headset's display for non-video footage) and therefore a loss of detail is unavoidable.
The only solution to this is having a higher PPI than the source video. And as you move the video footage further and further away, the PPI needs to increase to keep the video footage rendered at its native resolution.
We're talking about rendering a more distant bigger screen, so the solid angle and the number of pixel used is constant. The point obviously isn't to give the appearance of a tv-sized image placed 100 meters away, it's to render the appearance of a kilometer-sized screen 100 meters away.
And if you're wondering: "but then what's the difference"? The difference is based on a number of perceptual clues, such as
- at what distance do your eyes have to focus (this one isn't handled by current generation VR displays and will be the trickiest to get)
- vergence: what the angle between your eyes is
- parallax between the screen and other objects in your field of view
> We're talking about rendering a more distant bigger screen, so the solid angle and the number of pixel used is constant. The point obviously isn't to give the appearance of a tv-sized image placed 100 meters away, it's to render the appearance of a kilometer-sized screen 100 meters away.
If you stretch a fixed number of pixels you reduce the detail.
If you shrink a fixed number of pixels and display that at the same or lower resolution, you reduce detail.
I am genuinely puzzled as to what can create such a confusion. So to be very very clear:
If you were watching a 1000 pixels wide, 1 meter wide TV from one meter away, the level of details you perceive would be the same as if you were watching a 1000 pixels wide, 100 meter wide movie screen from 100 meters away.
The physical pixels on the movie screen would be larger, but you would perceive the same level of detail because they would touch the same number of rods on your retina.
If the two screens touch the same number of rods in your retina, how can you tell you're looking at a small screen upclose vs a large screen away? Several clues: parallax, vergence, and focus. VR can simulate two of those.
So if you were looking at the images produced by the VR set up for a large screen far away vs a small screen close by, they would occupy the same number of pixels on the VR display, the same! It would be just as detailed. But in one case, the two eyes would show you the images from two different angles, whereas in the other, the images would be much more similar. This is the only distance we're talking about, the perceptual distance created by the VR.
In all cases you're looking at the same number of pixels a few centimers away from your eyes, but perceptually it can be made to appear as if watching a large screen at a distance or a small screen upclose.
If you still don't understand, I can't help you beyond that point.
There's no such thing as "further away" with a VR headset. It's always an inch away, and the appearance of depth is just a stereoscopic trick.
> If the VR headset is 1080p and the video footage is 1080p, if you put it far away (i.e. it only takes up 50% or 25% of the VR headset's screen real-estate)
How far away it appears has nothing to do with the viewing angle, unless you also mention the virtual size of the virtual screen. A 10" screen at 1ft away will have a smaller viewing angle than a 1,000,000ft screen 500ft away.
> There's no such thing as "further away" with a VR headset. It's always an inch away, and the appearance of depth is just a stereoscopic trick.
Meaning objects get smaller, meaning that they take up less space on the resolution, meaning that you need higher PPI to render them at the same level of detail.
> How far away it appears has nothing to do with the viewing angle
Nobody is talking about viewing angles. I certainly never brought it up.
> Meaning objects get smaller, meaning that they take up less space on the resolution
Why? It's a virtual screen, why wouldn't you scale it up as well as moving it further? The sky is really far away from me, but it's pretty huge in my field of vision.
> Nobody is talking about viewing angles. I certainly never brought it up.
Which is why we are all saying you're wrong. It's entirely dependent on viewing angle and not distance. Distance and virtual screen size are how you can determine the viewing angle.
It has nothing to do with "pulling back" the screen. If the physical display resolution is not high enough, the virtual screen will look terrible regardless of how "close" it is. Even if you were trying to show the pixels on the virtual screen by rendering it very "close", it would still look terrible, because the physical pixels would have insufficient resolution to render the virtual pixels uniquely and clearly.
He didn't repeat back what you said at all. You said this:
> "But the "further" away you project the virtual movie screen, the higher the resolution of the VR headset needs to be to support it."
He's saying that's not true. He's also right. The resolution the physical VR screens need is completely unrelated to "how far" you project the virtual screen.
As things get smaller a greater PPI is needed to render the same level of detail. You don't mind losing detail, sure, you can keep the resolution the same and keep making it smaller and smaller (distance and size are one in the same in this scenario).
It ultimately boils down to "when detail gets smaller than a single pixel, it is lost." So the smaller the pixel the more detail you can render.
To be honest if you're watching non-HD resolution content, current generation VR headsets at the high end might be able to project it across the room and maintain detail. But HD? S-HD? IMAX? Meh, we aren't there yet.
And I agree with another comment that there is a "cap" on PPI. Once you reach it the human eye becomes the limitation, not the screen(s).
> As things get smaller a greater PPI is needed to render the same level of detail.
It really doesn't work that way. If your VR display is too low-resolution to convincingly render a virtual display 15 feet away, then it's too low-resolution to convincingly render the virtual display 15 inches away. Your physical display has the same resolution regardless of where the virtual screen is, and if it lacks sufficient resolution to render an object convincingly, it just cannot do it regardless of how distantly the object is rendered. To put it another way, your display has the ability to render a certain amount of detail, full stop. Where a virtual object is rendered is irrelevant.
Try this. Sit close to your monitor, close enough that text isn't crisp enough. Now zoom your display (Ctrl+'+' in most browsers), which is equivalent to bringing a virtual display closer. Note that the text still isn't crisp. If you could see the pixelation before, you can still see it. Moving the virtual display closer does nothing, because you aren't adding more resolution to the physical display.
> To put it another way, your display has the ability to render a certain amount of detail, full stop. Where a virtual object is rendered is irrelevant.
But we're talking about a virtual display displaying pre-existing content (e.g. video footage). We aren't talking about the object itself.
If it is one foot from you in virtual space, each pixel of video footage might be mapped 1:1 into each pixel of the VR headset's screen resolution. Therefore the loss of detail is 0%. Every pixel of video detail is transposed onto the display in the VR headset.
If the virtual object is further way (e.g. six feet) it takes up a smaller percentage of the VR headset's display, and therefore fewer physical pixels on the VR headset's display are used to render it. So now instead of 1:1 you might be 1:4, and you're seeing 25% of the video's original detail actually rendered on the VR headset's display.
> Try this. Sit close to your monitor, close enough that text isn't crisp enough. Now zoom your display (Ctrl+'+' in most browsers), which is equivalent to bringing a virtual display closer. Note that the text still isn't crisp. If you could see the pixelation before, you can still see it. Moving the virtual display closer does nothing, because you aren't adding more resolution to the physical display.
Your analogy is backwards and doesn't apply.
But sticking to that same analogy, go get 1080p resolution image. View it on a 1080p display. You're seeing 1:1 (100%) of the detail within the image (all of it). Now zoom out, and again, and again. Detail has been lost. First a little, then a lot, and as you go too far back substantial amounts have been. This is because a 1080p image on a 1080p display can only display 100% of the detail when it is viewed at 100%. As the image is zoomed (or further away in the VR headset's case) it is not possible to continue to consume all of the details as the pixels don't physically exist to display it.
So solve this problem you need a higher resolution than the source material, and it gets higher and higher the more you zoom. If you viewed a 1080p image on a 8640p display, you could zoom out significantly with absolutely no loss of detail, because the pixel density is such that it can still render every dot within the image.
So in order for a VR headset to be able to render stuff far away with no loss of detail the resolution of the headset has to be much higher than the source video. The further away the video gets, the higher the resolution. Again, that is if you want absolutely no loss of detail (in the real world, some loss of detail is acceptable).
In order to play back a 1080p video on a 1080p VR headset, the video either needs to be right in front of the viewer (at 1:1), you'll have to accept loss of detail when moving it further away, or you'll need a higher resolution on the VR headset than the source video (e.g. 4x more pixels on the headset than the source video, when it only takes up 1/4th of the VR headset's display space).
If the virtual display-video is only 1cm squared on each of the VR headset's displays, then that 1cm needs to have the same pixels as 1080p to display 1080p video with no loss of detail. It is just physics. As you move things further away in virtual reality they get rendered by fewer pixels on the real-world VR headset displays, and therefore loss of detail is unavoidable. You can only counteract this with higher PPI than the source video (or just accepting the loss of detail).
> If it is one foot from you in virtual space, each pixel of video footage might be mapped 1:1 into each pixel of the VR headset's screen resolution.
If you can actually map pixels 1:1, you aren't in a virtual space anyway. Accomplishing this 1:1 mapping means locking the view into a single position. If you allow me to look around, then as soon as I turn my head, the angle skews and you're not mapping 1:1 any more.
> So now instead of 1:1 you might be 1:4, and you're seeing 25% of the video's original detail actually rendered on the VR headset's display.
If 1:1 looks good, then 1:4 rendered 4 times as far away looks exactly as good. If you can't see the pixels at 1:1 then you can't see the lost detail at 1:4. If you could see the lost detail at 1:4, it would mean the 1:1 image looks pixelated. Again, your physical display doesn't care about how far away something is rendered. It has a fixed resolution, and if it's too low to be convincing, it's too low to be convincing at any rendered distance.
Go play an N64 game (or find some screenshots). You'll see that everything in the foreground is pretty rough looking. Everything in the background is equally rough looking, because rendered distance doesn't change the display resolution.
> Now zoom out, and again, and again. Detail has been lost. First a little, then a lot, and as you go too far back substantial amounts have been.
This doesn't matter. If it looks good at 1:1, then it will look good at 1:4. If it doesn't look good at 1:4, it didn't look good at 1:1. The lost detail is irrelevant.
> In order to play back a 1080p video on a 1080p VR headset...
I'm pretty sure you just can't do this convincingly, no matter the "zoom" level. If you rendered the video taking the entire display, then it would unpleasantly fill your entire vision and it wouldn't be VR and it would look terrible anyway.
> that 1cm needs to have the same pixels as 1080p to display 1080p video with no loss of detail
You're stuck on the idea that you need 1:1 pixels. You don't. You need a display with sufficient resolution to be convincing to your eyes. Once you have that, you can render your virtual 1080p image at any distance that would work in the real world and not care about how pixels are mapping.
No, it does not create "consumer confusion". Consumer confusion means consumers might be lead to think Product A, with a far to similar a name to Product B, literally is Product B. It's not at all about relative value comparison like "as good as" or "better than". You can put competitor products' names on your package, in your advertising, to make comparisons. Facebook could make ads selling themselves as "Facebook has 200% more users than G+", and Google cannot make a trademark infringement complaint, because it cannot possibly be interpreted by a "reasonable" consumer to say "Facebook is provided by Google".
There is no way to interpret what was said to say "SteamVR is the same thing as IMAX, from the same people, etc."
If someone (such as OP) believes that SteamVR can be a competitive experience with IMAX, then they can believe it can be certified or licensed by IMAX. Thus consumer confusion is possible here.
And there's a difference in saying "Twice the resolution of IMAX!" (for example) and saying "It's like having an IMAX theater in your house." Those aren't the same kinds of statements.
>If someone (such as OP) believes that SteamVR can be a competitive experience with IMAX, then they can believe it can be certified or licensed by IMAX.
This is a different issue -- of course IMAX /could/ license it; it's possible. The issue is whether people believe IMAX /has/ licensed it. This may be your point, but it's not clear to me.
If I say "this car is as good as a BMW", do you think I'm saying that the car is a BMW? If I say "the guitar my uncle made plays as smoothly as a Les Paul", do you think I'm saying I have Les Paul's signature on the headstock?
I think the comparisons and analogies are understood as such; I doubt the average consumer thinks the SteamVR has anything to do with IMAX.
Neither of your examples lead to consumer confusion. No one is confusing a head-mounted VR display with a 35 foot movie screen.
Believing that a VR solution could be certified/licensed by IMAX is not consumer confusion, that's accurate belief. IMAX could certify a VR solution as "The IMAX Experience" if they wanted to. But hell, Harley-Davidson could certify a VR solution as "The Open Road Experience" [1], too. Still no one is going to think a headset is a motorcycle.
[1] I made this up. I'm pretty sure Harley-Davidson does not use this as a motto/slogan/trademark/whatever.
The value of the IMAX trademark is that it's a set of standards for image projection, which is how it's being used in the quote. As if the product, which is concerned with image projection, is up to those standards.
Harley-Davidson, to my knowledge, isn't involved in image projection standards.
Say a lamp which isn't UL certified had a quote "It's like having a UL certified lamp in your house!" Would that seem ok? Or maybe questionable?
> The value of the IMAX trademark is that it's a set of standards for image projection, which is how it's being used in the quote
What article did you read? The quote most certainly did not refer to IMAX as a "set of standards for image projection". Here's the quote again:
> "The jump up in tech between playing a normal video game and playing with Kinect was X. The jump between a regular game and playing a room scale VR experience is X times 100. It’s like saying, 'I have an IMAX theater in my house.' It’s so much better that we can get away with a cumbersome setup."
There's nothing here about standards for image projection. The quote doesn't even compare the visual quality of SteamVR to IMAX. It says the jump in experience from a regular game to "room scale VR" is like the jump of putting an IMAX theater in your house. The quote is specifically about the huge improvement in the experience. You can tell because he literally referred to the "experience".
And none of this matters, because even if he had actually been saying that SteamVR looks like an IMAX screen, that would still not create consumer confusion. Comparing products' quality is a reasonable thing and we do it all the time without creating confusion. Someone reviewing a Samsung LCD could say that it looks as good as their Panasonic plasma, and this is a reasonable and probably useful comparison to make. It wouldn't confuse any reasonable person into believing that Panasonic was manufacturing, certifying, or licensing Samsung displays (or vice versa).
> Say a lamp which isn't UL certified had a quote "It's like having a UL certified lamp in your house!" Would that seem ok? Or maybe questionable?
It seems like a stupid thing to say because the statement doesn't make a lot of sense. Saying "It's like having a UL certified lamp in your house!" is kind of like saying "It's like having a car that won't kill you in a crash!" It reads like sarcasm. No one would make this comparison in a serious way.
But no, I don't think it creates any kind of consumer confusion.
"The jump up in tech between playing a normal video game and playing with Kinect was X. The jump between a regular game and playing a room scale VR experience is X times 100. It’s like saying, 'I have an IMAX theater in my house.' It’s so much better that we can get away with a cumbersome setup."
You can't see how that quote implies it's up to IMAX standards? Why even use the IMAX name if not to invoke the idea that it's up to their standards?
It's the experience jump. (These are literal words from the quote.) He could have said the improvement is like driving a McLaren P1 to work. It wouldn't mean it's literally supposed to be the same as driving a McLaren.
You're completely missing the point anyway. You keep debating your ridiculous interpretation of the quote and it doesn't matter because even if your interpretation of the quote were correct, there would be no confusion created. Here, I'll say the thing you're pretending the quote says:
"SteamVR looks exactly like an IMAX screen"
No one will read that and think IMAX is selling, licensing, creating, or certifying SteamVR, because there's nothing in there that says that. Nor will anyone thing that SteamVR and IMAX are the same thing, because if they were the same thing, you wouldn't be comparing them.
> If someone (such as OP) believes that SteamVR can be a competitive experience with IMAX, then they can believe it can be certified or licensed by IMAX. Thus consumer confusion is possible here.
The test isn't whether someone can believe it, in the sense that it isn't physically impossible that at least one person could believe it. Thankfully. It's, according to the article, whether there's a likelyhood of confusion. I.e. whether an average, reasonably prudent consumer would be likely to be confused.
> If someone (such as OP) believes that SteamVR can be a competitive experience with IMAX, then they can believe it can be certified or licensed by IMAX. Thus consumer confusion is possible here.
I think more relevant is that if it is a competing experience, then the comparison -- especially in the context of promoting SteamVR by someone with a vested interest (including someone intending to sell software for the SteamVR platform) -- raises issues of trademark dilution and/or misappropriation even in the absence of the specific kind of consumer confusion that would be necessary for trademark infringement.
"Like" is not the same as "is". For a consumer to be confused, it would be no fault of the speaker, because the speaker expressed themselves correctly. Your argument is that users could misinterpret what is said, willfully ignore the meaning of words. By that standard, I could say "my product has nothing to do with IMAX" and someone could choose to ignore it and say "he said IMAX! It must be IMAX." No court is going to apply such a standard, because it is ludicrous.
You're missing the point, which is that you can't just make up an opinion about whether something causes consumer confusion. It's a legal term that gets interpreted in a particular way.
I try not to downvote people for mere opinions that differ from mine, but I will downvote people whose posts are just uninformed or simply wrong.
(I didn't downvote here, because I'm not super familiar with how the courts interpret consumer confusion, but I suspect that the parent is just wrong about the term, and it's not just a matter of opinion).
Has it? The quoted article had an interview with a developer where the developer mentioned IMAX. Not the article, but a guy with quotes around it. How does that lead to any consumer confusion at all?
At least HN doesn't seem to be perpetuating the Reddit hypocrisy about voting for quality and not popularity, but the problem remains, voting popular opinions up and unpopular ones down only serves to turn the place into an echo chamber. Though mostly it's annoying to have to select the text to be able to read it as it gets lighter and lighter.
Good idea. But what I should do is write a script that in addition to that puts and indicator so I know which posts the HN readership has decided my feeble little mind needs to be spared from lest I too start having unpopular opinions.
Which is too late by now anyway, since I have tons of them.
I've obviously given up caring about downvotes here or I wouldn't have said anything at all on this story.
I don't understand why the mods think discouraging people from expressing unpopular opinions is desirable. It puzzles me to the extent that I wonder if I misunderstand the purpose of having comments at all. But it's how it is.
The problem isn't that your opinion is unpopular. The problem is that you're misrepresenting your opinion in terms of a legal concept. The term "confusion" has specific meaning in trademark law, which you seem to resist acknowledging. Even if you have a point, you're going to frustrate others by being thick-headed.
See dragonwriter's comment for a good concise clarification.
Honestly, we're all just talking past each other. I knew it would be hopeless to get the idea across in this environment of jump all over the stupid thing of the day, but I wanted to try anyway.
As far as the legal concept goes, it should be clear that I'm just interpreting what IMAX's general counsel seems to believe. Whether you agree with her or not, I wouldn't say she's uninformed on the topic.
It's ironic that in an article documenting attempted censorship, I have to squint to read this legitimate comment because people think that disagreeing with someone gives them the right to censor them.
I take personal issue with the fading of downvoted comments.
1) The mechanic silences an opinion by making it harder to read/requiring highlighting to read
2) Swaying public opinion of a comment without even reading it. "Oh, it's already almost faded out entirely. It's probably a terrible post that I should just downvote without actually reading." (E: I understand HN requires you to "spend" a karma to downvote something. This doesn't prevent people from using their karma in this manner when they have 1,000's)
3) Allows self-validation of "others agree with me, because this comment has been downvoted and I disagree with this comment", which is fallacious reasoning. Popular/majority opinion can be wrong and patting yourself on the back for having other people agree with you can be detrimental. Self-validation without critically thinking about your opponents arguments is an injustice to them.
I have a rule in Stylish to set "font" to #333 so that all comments appear the same for me. Unless someone mentions "why is this downvoted", I'm completely unaware of any comments being downvoted. I find this leads to a better experience on HN.
Note: For #3 I use "you/yourself" in a "third party not necessarily you 'you'" way.
One interesting recent change is that you won't see your own downvoted comments as greyed out. You used to, but I think someone said it was offputting (which it kinda is) and dang & company changed it.
Except it relies on a false fact, that this has anything to do with the legal concept of "consumer confusion". It's not just an opinion, it's actively promoting falsehoods.
This is why IMAX is annoyed: they understand that VR is a huge threat to their business. The reason watching a movie on a very large screen is better than watching it up-close on a small screen is that in the case of the large screen, your eyes can relax by focusing at infinity. With VR, you can effectively simulate an infinitely large screen infinitely far away.