For the uninitiated 3DoF means the headset only tracks the rotation of your head, not your heads absolute position as you move around, while 6DoF tracking does both. 6DoF is also much harder to implement.
Probably some have tried and I’ll be curious to know what prevent it.
Maybe Cardboard could have attempted to use the phones camera for SLAM, but a single lens would only have got them so far. Dedicated VR headsets have at least four cameras pointing in different directions, which are sometimes augmented by IR projectors and/or LiDAR.
Besides, VR is already cheap. A new Quest 3S is just $300 and can do pretty much all of what the $3500 Vision Pro can do (just worse); if you just want VR games you can get used 6DOF-capable PCVR or PSVR headsets on eBay for closer to $100.
6DOF, even when sitting, is a significant difference. Your brain immediately feels far more at home with good 6DOF.
Fun fact : one week I spent about 5-6 hours every evening playing Elite Dangerous in VR. Mining asteroids while listening to lofi cyberpunk and pretending that mining was my whole life, it was great. Until my partner would bop me on the back of the head ^_^
A few years back, we did design a set of <160USD parts to get repeatable absolute head and controller spacial location/pose to sub +-3mm in a room. The key was being able to resolve stable _absolute_ pose at >24Hz with <10kiB/s of low-latency data to handle. i.e. a small generic mcu _quickly_ handles the dual kalman filters and IMU sensors fusion, and battery life is reasonable.
Now build your own versions, it is not that hard... ask Alphabet/Meta/Apple... lol...
Those new 3D lenticular screens look pretty cool, but the prices are still not for consumer hardware yet.
Best of luck =3
Best regards =3
The translational drift is harder for VR/AR headsets indoors. Drones can do sensor fusion with GPS and the accelerometers to solve translational drift from the accelerometers (or, for FPV drones, they just let the meatware compensate).
https://github.com/HadesVR/HadesVR
It is derived from Relativty and the communities overlap.
So even a good "9DoF" IMU is not usable for 6DoF VR, as it still drifts way too much. Sadly the magnetometer in the IMUs suffers from all the magnetic fields generated by the rest of the electronics around it.
This might also be one of the reasons why 9DoF IMUs are increasingly rare on the market.
Besides 'it's Meta' ; what is it doing with my privacy? I mean actually proven things, not 'probably it is'.
(I am not saying it isn't, but I haven't heard anything in this regard, so it would be interesting to know)
this line of argument don't help the discussion.
both companies report millions from selling your information, so assume they are always amassing loads of it, to sell when the price is convenient for them.
I'd like to place a picture with a QR code in it, have somebody scan the code, then have the option of jumping into a world.
Apps can't access the cameras so you can't write a QR scanner. The Quest has a decent web browser but you can't access the cameras and make a web based QR scanner.
Without access to the cameras apps cannot at all understand the environment and enable you to interact with it. AR apps now have a special module that identifies a physical volume inside your space on a session by session but that's a pale shadow of the SLAM tracking of the Microsoft Hololens and Apple Vision that let you stick a "hologram" into the corner of your office and have it stay there.
Quest 3 devs need more access to make more interesting apps.
I want super high res so the quality is comparable to a TV or projector setup, and I want OLED because of contrast performance for dark scenes.
The sensor fusion of IMUs is usually not stable very long, but it does mitigate a few of the very noticeable problems with camera trackers.
Still, it always boils down to the power budget... having a 2.6 kg head mounted unit is ludicrous. lol =)
I've had pretty good experience with https://goovis.net/products/g3max specifically for movie watching. It has 2560x1440 (per eye) OLED, so not quite 4K; I do hope to see a proper 4K headset like that some day for a reasonable price.
A further complication is that the IMUs you find in phones, especially back when all this was new, weren't very good. So even a plain 3DoF experience would suffer from slow response and yaw-drift from lack of magnetometer, which is why GearVR had an extra IMU in the headset and why Daydream required new certified phones with better IMUs.
3DoF can still be good enough for VR180/360 movies, which don't allow movement to begin with. But as far as gaming is concerned, you really do need 6DoF, as even a bit of leaning forward in a chair will make it instantly obvious that the headset motion and the headset visuals are out of sync.
https://www.amazon.com/Glasses-Massive-Micro-OLED-Augmented-...
For $200 they are good. They are native 1080p Sony micro-OLED panels. Brightness and contrast are excellent. I got them mainly to use when traveling, but I also use them laying in bed sometimes.
The resolution is higher than it seems because the 1080p is only displayed across about a 40 degree horizontal FOV, so the PPD is actually very high at about 49, which is markedly higher than even something like the Apple Vision Pro. It's also RGB stripe OLED. I cannot see the pixels like I can with VR headsets.
But alas, there are issues that bother me like ghosting and other internal reflections inside the lenses. Though all VR headsets I have tried have these issues which bother me, so I am not sure if that will ever actually be solved to a level that is unnoticeable by me.
The other thing about the glasses is that they don't recreate a theater, and a virtual room, so the apparent size of the virtual screen isn't consistent as it mainly depends on your imagination for how big you imagine it being. If you view a virtual screen in a fully virtual environment like Bigscreen Beta, then you can fully trick your brain into making the virtual screen seem as big as you want, even IMAX sized, and it really does feel like it.
The problem with full VR environment headsets and large FOV over 100 degrees means that the virtual screen only takes up at most about half of the panel, because a 55 FOV for a virtual screen on a headset with a 110 FOV is about as big as most people would be comfortable. So then a true 4K per eye headset would still only give you a 1080p victual screen. Though I think this is still a level which is good enough.
Once the technology started emerging, I was so exited about the potential. A few games gained support for shutter glasses etc, but 6dof was hyped up so much that everyone jumped on that train instead.
I think of this kinda like the data collection with many phone apps. I understand that it needs access to the networks to make connection to wifi or bluetooth, but why is this bundled together with an app's ability to record and send that data back to the developer? There has to be a better way to handle all this.