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Samsung GearVR Pixelation

Discussion in 'AR/VR (XR) Discussion' started by Kazmi, Nov 5, 2015.

  1. Kazmi

    Kazmi

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    I've tried multiple forums and suggestions but still im getting a very pixelated final output, when running my unity build on the GearVR. Is there anyway to increase the final resolution on the Samsung S6 so it doesnt look all blocky in the GearVR ?
     
    Last edited: Nov 5, 2015
  2. sbutler

    sbutler

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    Make sure you have 2x anti-aliasing set in your quality settings on the default setting for android. By default the AA might be off which would make it look very blocky,
     
  3. cramsan

    cramsan

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    I dont know if it was a Unity bug, but I was experiencing the same issue using Unity 5.1X around a month ago. But then when I upgraded to 5.2 it went away. It could also be that 5.1 had some default setting to use a lower resolution or AA than it should, but I dont know what where that could be.
     
  4. Haleluya

    Haleluya

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    I have the same problem.
     
  5. vicator

    vicator

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    With blocky do you mean the whole view or just the shadows?
    Note that what you see in the Unity Editor is not the whole truth - you need to build and test frequently to find errors in your gfx output.
     
  6. cramsan

    cramsan

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    He mentioned that he was running it on the device. When I was experiencing something similar, it looked like everything was running at a lower resolution.
     
    AcidArrow likes this.
  7. Kazmi

    Kazmi

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    Not just the shadows. I mean the whole thing. It runs fine on pc/inspector/camera-view/non-virtual-apk format, but in Samsung Gear VR, it looks like im watching a 640x480 movie forced-scaled to a 4k screen.
    By blocky/pixelated, i do mean - you can see individual pixels.
     
  8. Kazmi

    Kazmi

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    I'l try the upgrade then, thanks!
     
  9. Cascho01

    Cascho01

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    Perhaps everything works as it should. You can see individual pixels, because they are very close to your eyes and have to fill a very big part of your viewing field. Don´t forget that each eye only gets half of the pixels available and even less.
    The 2.560 x 1.440 pixels of the screen are simply not enough to let them "disappear". Even twice of them wouldn´t.
     
    Last edited: Nov 12, 2015
  10. sbutler

    sbutler

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    Kazmi, did you check your anti-aliasing setting for Android in the quality settings as mentioned above?
     
  11. Kazmi

    Kazmi

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    Yes, its at 2x. It still looks pixelated even at 8x!
     
  12. AcidArrow

    AcidArrow

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    It's called screen door effect. There isn't anything you can do about it (other than use an Oculus DK1 for a while, to get some perspective on how worse the screen door effect could be :p )
     
    guru20 likes this.
  13. Kazmi

    Kazmi

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    Yea but shouldn't it be like those 2 circles on the phone's screen utilizing the max pixels available in the phone's screen (on those locations on screen) ?
    I'm currently upgrading to 5.2.2 too see if that helps, as cramsan suggested.
     
  14. Kazmi

    Kazmi

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    LOL. I wonder who at Samsung thought "Hey, lets put awesome magnification lenses in the gear so that anything less than 4k resolution appears broken into pieces!"
     
  15. Kazmi

    Kazmi

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    But if normal 360* videos and pictures can overcome that pixelation effect by using high resolution outputs, why cant unity export that high quality output for GearVR.
     
  16. AcidArrow

    AcidArrow

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    Wait, they can?

    It could be something else though.
     
  17. cramsan

    cramsan

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    This is unrelated to the screen door effect. You can play any game at the resolution it actually really good. As I mentioned on my post, I think a setting may be forcing the resolution to lower than it should.

    When it happened to me I was very confused as well. I compared my demo to other GearVR apps and they all look crisp and high def but my Unity demo looked blocky and super low-res.

    Cesar Ramirez
     
    AcidArrow likes this.
  18. koblongata

    koblongata

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    It's still the same, the output (both in game preview and the android app) ignores the AA settings.
    Tested with latest Unity 5.3.1f1 with Oculus Unity 5 Utilities V0.1.3.0-beta.
     
  19. bgolus

    bgolus

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    Are you using deferred rendering? You need to be using the forward rendering path for AA to work.
     
  20. TheCuber

    TheCuber

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    Facing the same problem. Cardboard seems to use the full resolution of the S6Edge, whereas GearVR seems to have a much worse resolution. This is not the case with all the oculus-supplied apps like the 360° images, movie theatre or even the real 3D-panoramaimages. It's absurd that the cardboard-version looks much better and more crisp than the GearVR.
    Of course the Gear has a more responsive and precise headtracking and a slightly higher framerate..... but what's the use if it looks blocky?

    So is there a setting somewhere to enhance the resolution?
     
  21. Poupi

    Poupi

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    You are looking for : http://docs.unity3d.com/ScriptReference/VR.VRSettings-renderScale.html
    I know it wasn't working on older version of Unity (5.1 I think), but it's certainly available now on the latest versions.
    Keep in mind that increasing the render scale can totally kill your overall framerate.
    I worked a bit on GearVR with S6 and S6Edge, and I never noticed some pixelisation, maybe it's something related to your project.
    Can you reproduce it on an empty project with just a few primitives and textures ?
     
  22. JDMulti

    JDMulti

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    I had this same issue and found out I had my scene on defered rendering and the AA got turned off every single time when I ran it. Took me a while to figure out to force it to forward rendering and put AA on 2x. Some things aren't just written down very well in documentation or easy to read over. But well it's new technology ;)
     
  23. elhongo

    elhongo

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    Had this same problem. And found a fix. Try building the App with a Minimum API Level of "Lollipop 21". I am also using a Canvas Scaler in my UI which was my main problem. I have it set to "Dynamic Pixels Per Unit" = 7 and "Reference Pixels Per Unit" = 1. I am also using a Quality level = simple. Hope these configurations solve your problem. Good Luck!
     
  24. MaxB

    MaxB

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    Moving to Lollipop fixes it for me. To be clear, the issue as mentioned is not an AA issue: the overall scale of the render is reduced producing way more jaggie edges than you would see even without AA.

    I assume that Unity is doing behind the scenes adjustment of VRSettings.renderScale if we attempt to run VR on an older device?
     
  25. aneraghu

    aneraghu

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    I am also facing same kind of issue. I have tried all these solution but didn't work out. we are using some lighting and even we have baked the lighting but when we baking the light texture is not coming properly and it's giving jerk motion when moving the OVR Camera.
    What would be solution for this?
     
  26. skullthug

    skullthug

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    Wanted to also pile onto this, my Google cardboard builds look high res and clean but my GearVR builds (when building with Virtual Reality Supported) are lower res and full of jaggie edges. If I use the cardboard build on my GearVR it looks like it's at the correct resolution (so it's not the lens or unit itself clearly). So it seems like it must be something related to the build process when enabling "Virtual Reality Supported". Using 5.3.4p1.

    EDIT: On the Gear VR build renderScale is set to 1, which I would assume would be 1:1 to the resolution I'm expecting. So that's a little odd.
    Setting it to something like 1.4 makes everything look 'correct', but performance tanks. Seems rather fishy because the cardboard one will render at high res with great performance.
     
    Last edited: Apr 27, 2016