Oculus Research, the VR and AR R&D division of the company, today announced a new display technology that they’re calling the “Focal Surface Display.” The display aims to improve the vergence-accommodation conflict that plagues today’s VR headsets. The company calls the work “groundbreaking.”
Oculus Research’s Focal Surface Display prototype | Photo courtesy Oculus
Oculus Research has published a paper and will present the research on the focal surface display at the SIGGRAPH conference this July. A video released by Oculus (heading this article) gives a brief explanation of what the display achieves. Anaccompanying blog post offers additional detail.
Focal surface displays mimic the way our eyes naturally focus at objects of varying depths. Rather than trying to add more and more focus areas to get the same degree of depth, this new approach changes the way light enters the display using spatial light modulators (SLMs) to bend the headset’s focus around 3D objects—increasing depth and maximizing the amount of space represented simultaneously.
All of this adds up to improved image sharpness and a more natural viewing experience in VR.
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By combining leading hardware engineering, scientific and medical imaging, computer vision research, and state-of-the-art algorithms to focus on next-generation VR, this project takes a highly interdisciplinary approach—one that, to the best of our knowledge, has never been tried before. It may even let people who wear corrective lenses comfortably use VR without their glasses.
The researchers are employing a spatial light modulator which appears to be able to selectively bend light to change its focus for select parts of the image.
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Source: Flipboard