VR is incredible. Anyone who has spent any time with either of the top-of-the-range headsets – the Oculus Rift or HTC Vive – will know that VR is an experience that is almost impossible to explain, even to those that have tried the more accessible Gear VR.
That said, it isn’t perfect. One of the main things that feels unnatural is the fact that everything is in focus the entire time. It doesn’t feel too jarring to start with, it’s more that you just have a feeling that something isn’t right. Your brain knows that what it’s looking at isn’t real. It can’t be.
In the real world, when you look at an object, your eyes automatically focus to that point and the rest of the world goes out of focus. The problem with VR is that no matter where you are looking in the VR world, you’re only ever actually looking at the screen, which is the same distance away.
This leads to a problem catchily referred to as vergence-accommodation conflict (VAC), that according to Oculus: “has been attributed as a source of visual discomfort: viewers report eye strain, blurred vision, and headaches with prolonged viewing.”
And there was us thinking it was just having a screen an inch from your face that was causing that.
What am I looking at?
It turns out that Oculus has been working on a solution for this problem, detailing to TechRadar plans to implement a ‘focal surface display’. For an explanation about how this works, check out the video made by Oculus below.
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Source: TechRadar