> 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.
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).