Close objects make me squint... Vive VR

Hi there,

I am setting up a real-life sized stage in VR with a microphone stand in front of you... Everything looks great and dimensions look right. But when you come closer than 20cm to the microphone the stereo effect starts to get awkward and I have to squint in order to still see it right. When I get super close I cant focus anymore.

Any ideas how to make this nicer?

Best,
Ludwig

 

Would love to know this too.. there must be an adaptive way to adjust ocular distance for macro observations.

 

What about two cameras. Both rendering to VR. One with smaller offset and small clip distance and the other behind with larger offset and clipping plane starting where first camera ends?

 

Doesn't this kind of happen IRL / outside VR?

I imagine this is also possibly the worst case for the accommodation reflect (where your eye's focus wants to change in relation to convergence)

I saw a paper about image deconvolution to account for/cancel out blurring introduced by the human visual system, it wasn't real time graphics, but I have wondered if some kind of inverse DoF / sharpen effect to account for the eye's want to change focus might make VR more comfortable... probably won't work for cheap sharpening or would be too hard to get right...

 

Hello,
did you find any solution for this?

 

No, haven't found a solution.

But as nat42 states, this might actually be a normal thing – VR being virtually simulated might just mean that we go closer to objects than we are supposed to!

 

Doesn't VR lenses has a fixed focus where the "real" focus are? So if your eyes tries to focus any closer then where the display are, things will get offset. Just what happens in real life when you put a finger in front of your eyes and focus on something further away, you will see two fingers.

Have you also tried adjusting the IPD settings on your headset? Could maybe be something with that too.

And how does it work in other VR apps/games? Ex if you are in your headsets meny, and put the controller next to your face, does it look good? Just tried it in my Quest 2 and works fine, except the focus is a bit off, so looks a bit blurry.

 

This is an effect of the fixed focus of VR lenses. Your brain thinks it needs to adjust your eyes' focal distance to look at close objects, but in VR everything is at a 2m to infinite focal distance (depending on the headset). You can test this yourself: try to look at the nearby object but force your eyes to focus in the distance, you'll notice you can actually make out details on the nearby object now even though the image will no longer converge.

This is also exactly what Oculus is trying to tackle with their varifocal display research.

The solution for VR games for now? Don't put objects near the user's face.