Category: oculus half dome

Posted on

Oculus’ Varifocal Prototype Half Dome has Two New Variants

The first day of Oculus Connect 6 (OC6) looked like it was going to be dominated by software updates and announcements as plenty of new hardware has been released in 2019. Thankfully, Facebook Reality Lab Chief Scientist Michael Abrash used his portion of the keynote to update everyone on Half Dome, the prototype headset first revealed during OC5 which featured mechanical varifocal displays. The team has been working on not one but two designs, both tackling different problems. 

Oculus Half Dome Family
Half Dome (left), Half Dome 2 (middle) and Half Dome 3 (right)

Abrash unveiled Half Dome 2 and Half Dome 3 prototypes, both significantly sleeker and smaller than the original model. The 2018 version featured Fresnel lenses with a 140° field of view (FoV) with mechanically driven displays based on eye-tracking to ensure the image remains sharp. Half Dome 2 improves on this design in a number of ways, with the team looking at ergonomics and comfort.

As is noticeable from the images, the Half Dome 2 prototype is substantially smaller and lighter, with a weight reduction of 200 grams over its predecessor. This has meant the FoV is narrower than Half Dome 1 but still wider than Oculus Quest.

When it comes to Half Dome 3 the team designed an electronic version of the varifocal mechanism, replacing the mechanical parts with a new type of liquid crystal lens made of two optical elements: polarization-dependent lenses (PDLs) and switchable half-wave plates.

“PDLs are special because their focal length changes based on their polarization state. By changing the voltage applied to the switchable plates, we can toggle between the two focal lengths. This could make for a great set of digital bifocals, but it doesn’t necessarily make for comfortable VR. By stacking a series of PDLs and switchable half-wave plates on top of each other, we’re able to achieve smooth varifocal that lets you comfortably and seamlessly adjust your focus in the headset,” explains the team on Oculus Blog.

Oculus Half Dome 3
Electronic varifocal system of Half Dome 3 (left), original Half Dome prototype (right).

The Half Dome 3 design may still be in the prototype stage but the new design certainly offers a tidy form factor going forward. As further details on Facebook Reality Labs’ Half Dome prototypes are revealed, VRFocus will let you know.

Posted on

Facebook Open-Sources its AI Platform DeepFocus to Improve VR Visual Rendering

Facebook Reality Labs (FRL) has been experimenting with a number of ways to improve the realism of virtual reality (VR), through both hardware and software means. During the Facebook Developers Conference (F8) 2018 in May the company unveiled Half Dome, a prototype headset with a varifocal mechanism. Now the lab has revealed DeepFocus, an AI-powered platform designed to render blur in real time and at various focal distances.

Deep Focus demo

What Deep Focus and Half Dome are both trying to achieve is something our eyes do naturally, a defocus effect. As the gif above demonstrates, when our eyes look at objects at different distances whatever they’re not focused on is blurred and out of focus. While this may seem simple, trying to replicate the effect in VR isn’t exactly easy, but its creation has a whole bunch of use cases for the technology.

The first is the goal of truly realistic experiences inside VR. “Our end goal is to deliver visual experiences that are indistinguishable from reality,” says Marina Zannoli, a vision scientist at FRL via the Oculus Blog. “Our eyes are like tiny cameras: When they focus on a given object, the parts of the scene that are at a different depth look blurry. Those blurry regions help our visual system make sense of the three-dimensional structure of the world, and help us decide where to focus our eyes next. While varifocal VR headsets can deliver a crisp image anywhere the viewer looks, DeepFocus allows us to render the rest of the scene just the way it looks in the real world: naturally blurry.”

Another important aspect of DeepFocus is the comfort. The more natural VR looks and feels, the easier it is to use. “This is about all-day immersion,” says Douglas Lanman, FRL’s Director of Display Systems Research. “Whether you’re playing a video game for hours or looking at a boring spreadsheet, eye strain, visual fatigue and just having a beautiful image you’re willing to spend your day with, all of that matters.”

Oculus Half Dome

While FRL is currently using DeepFocus with Half Dome the software has been designed to be platform agnostic, which is why the DeepFocus team is open-sourcing the work and data set for engineers developing new VR systems, vision scientists, and other researchers studying perception. As further updates from FRL are released, VRFocus will let you know.

Posted on

Facebook Open-sources DeepFocus Algorithm for More Realistic Varifocal VR Rendering

DeepFocus is Facebook’s AI-driven renderer that’s said to produce natural looking blur in real-time, something that’s poised to go hand-in-hand with the varifocal displays of tomorrow. Today, Facebook announced that DeepFocus is going open source; while the company’s wide field of view (FOV) prototype ‘Half Dome’ may be proprietary, their deep learning tool will be “hardware agnostic.”

When you hold up your hand in front of you, your eyes naturally converge and accommodate, bringing your hand into focus. The experience of this isn’t the same in the VR headsets of today however since the light is coming from a fixed source, sending your eyes into overdrive to resolve near-field images. This is where varifocal displays and eye tracking comes in, as the once fixed focal length becomes variable to match your eyes depending on where you’re looking at any given moment.

Essentially it will let you focus on objects regardless of their distance from you, making the overall experience more comfortable and immersive. But the missing piece of the puzzle here is the ability for the headset to also replicate natural-looking defocus blur too, something that happens when you focus on your hand and the background goes fuzzy. Enter DeepFocus.

 

In a research paper presented at SIGGRAPH Asia 2018, the company says DeepFocus is inspired by “increasing evidence of the important role retinal defocus blur plays in driving accommodative responses, as well as the perception of depth and physical realism.”

Unlike more traditional AI systems used for deep learning-based image analysis, DeepFocus is said to processes visuals while maintaining the ultrasharp image resolutions necessary for high-quality VR.

SEE ALSO
Eye-tracking is a Game Changer for VR That Goes Far Beyond Foveated Rendering

That means not only will things look more realistic in varifocal VR headsets and even AR headsets with light-field displays, they’ll also mitigate eyestrain associated with vergence-accommodation conflict.

“This network is demonstrated to accurately synthesize defocus blur, focal stacks, multilayer decompositions, and multiview imagery using only commonly available RGB-D images, enabling real-time, near-correct depictions of retinal blur with a broad set of accommodation-supporting HMDs,” Facebook researchers say.

Facebook will be publishing both the source and neural net training data today “for engineers developing new VR systems, vision scientists, and other researchers studying perception,” the company says in a blog post.

Introducing DeepFocus at Oculus Connect 5, Facebook Reality Lab’s chief scientist Michael Abrash said that while Half Dome and DeepFocus are essentially “just the start for optics and displays, which is the poster child for how progress is accelerating.”

The post Facebook Open-sources DeepFocus Algorithm for More Realistic Varifocal VR Rendering appeared first on Road to VR.

Posted on

Oculus Rift 2: Now More Fact Than Fiction

It came as quite a shock this week when one of Oculus’ founders, Brendan Iribe, confirmed that he would be leaving his position within Facebook/Oculus after six years. With Palmer Lucky having departed around the same time last year the original group that started this immersive journey has begun to dwindle, but it wasn’t so much Iribe’s departure more so his possible reasoning that caught people’s attention, the cancellation of Oculus Rift 2.

Oculus Half Dome headset

Will there be a Rift 2?

As I’m sure you’re aware by now Iribe announced his leaving via a Facebook post which led to TechCrunch reporting this was partially to do with an internal shake up that’s seen the second generation of Oculus Rift being abandoned.

Well what a furore that created, with Oculus responding with: “we are planning a future version of Rift,” going on to cite Mark Zuckerberg’s comments at Oculus Connect 5 (OC5) which were: “when we release the next version of Rift—which isn’t this year—all of the content that works for Rift will also work on the next version.”

What’s been great to take away from all this is the fact that Oculus have concretely stated a second generation Oculus Rift is in development. This you may say is unsurprising as hardware can take years to develop so of course Oculus would be working on one. However, the leap from experimental to consumer version is massive so for a global company to say that is still very important. Plus there’s the little fact that two new headsets will be released within a year of each other.

Oculus Quest (OC5)

Present Hardware

For ease of use let’s call it the Oculus Rift 2. Currently Oculus has the Gear VR, Oculus Go, Oculus Rift and Oculus Quest in its stable of hardware. Oculus Go certainly impressed when it launched during F8 2018, going on to see decent sales success as a media device rather than gaming unit. Oculus Quest looks set to be the big driving force for 2019 offering a ‘near Rift experience’ whilst being standalone with Oculus Touch controllers and inside-out tracking.

Oculus Quest’s arrival in Spring next year is likely to kill many Oculus Rift sales as consumers want to go tangle free, no longer shackled to their PC’s – or needing a VR-ready one for that matter. This will obviously see a drop in graphics quality due to the Qualcomm processor inside. So if Oculus Quest can do almost everything its PC-based brother can do where would the sequel venture?

Oculus Go GDC Promo Hero

What the second gen needs to succeed

Firstly, Oculus Rift 2 would need to offer greatly improved graphics over the other models, this would require an even beefier PC using the latest graphics cards – possibly NVIDIA’s RTX 2070 as a bare minimum? And how would this get to the headset. The new VirtualLink standard could be one way, but that then leads down a tethered system route which consumers may not want to put up with by then.

Wireless would be the way to go so long as were possible to transmit the increased amount of data whilst keeping factors like form and weight to a minimum.

The new headset would likely feature the latest cutting-edge technologies which we’re already familiar with. Eye-tracking and foveated rendering to make graphical processing easier whilst improving social interaction, and hand tracking to make physical interaction with virtual environments even more lifelike.

What about the experiments we’re only just learning about. Oculus Half Dome for example was a varifocal mechanism showcased during F8 2018 to make it easier for user’s eyes to focus. This also had the added benefit of improve the field of view (FoV) from 110 degrees to 140 degrees. FoV isn’t something Oculus discusses very often yet it’s an important vertical to consider when the likes of Pimax are aiming of 200-degrees.

Oculus Rift 2 is on the cards with a release no earlier than 2020 by the sounds of it. Having that plus Oculus Quest in 2019 would be too much for one year, innovation is great just not too quickly. Oculus Rift found a pricing sweet spot when it finally hit $399. Hopefully its successor will be priced at a similar level, although with all the new tech it needs to include that might be tricky.

Posted on

Oculus Research Becomes ‘Facebook Reality Labs’, Creating “further and faster” Leaps in AR/VR

Oculus today announced it’s rebranding Oculus Research, the company’s R&D lab, to the newly created Facebook Reality Labs (FRL). The shift, the company says, better addresses the increasingly important role of research and development in AR/VR while emphasizing collaboration with Facebook’s other skunkworks, something Oculus Chief Scientist Michael Abrash says is allowing for “further and faster” development of leading-edge AR/VR tech.

The lab’s focus on the future hasn’t changed, the company says, although the new name reflects a new role the R&D group plays “not only at Oculus, but also across Facebook’s AR/VR organization, which includes Building 8, Camera, and Social VR,” an Oculus spokesperson told Road to VR.

Facebook’s Building 8 specializes in researching and productizing advances in AR, VR, AI and more.

The company announced the change via a Facebook post by Oculus Chief Scientist Michael Abrash.

Image courtesy Oculus

Abrash famously offered up some bold predictions at Oculus Connect 3 back in 2016, which outlined a pretty specific direction for AR/VR on its five-year march forward, including the prediction that VR headsets would double the number of current pixels per degree to 30, push the resolution to around 4,000 × 4,000 pixels per display, and widen the field of view to 140 degrees. Both Oculus Rift and HTC Vive currently offer 15 pixels per degree, a resolution of 1,080 × 1,200 pixels per display, and a field of view of around 110 degrees.

Abrash presciently announced then that the current tech’s fixed depth of focus would also likely become variable within 5 years. Many of these technologies, including varifocal displays and 140 degree field of view, are incorporated in Oculus’ Half Dome prototype, which was revealed last week at Facebook’s F8 developer conference.

Image courtesy Facebook

“We are just a year and a half along now [after Connect 3], and I would say those predictions are holding up well,” Abrash says. “In fact, the truth is that I probably undershot, thanks to Facebook’s growing investment in FRL, which allows us to push the boundaries of what it takes to build great experiences further and faster. We are helping Oculus and all of Facebook create trailblazing AR and VR experiences, from what’s most affordable to leading edge.”

SEE ALSO
Oculus on Half Dome Prototype: 'don't expect to see everything in a product anytime soon'

Abrash says FRL “brings together a world-class R&D team of researchers, developers, and engineers with the shared goal of developing AR and VR across the spectrum,” and that while there are plenty of issues with VR and AR at present, “they’re all solvable, and they are going to get solved.”

With increasing investment, the company will no doubt continue its mission to push forward a number of related fields including optics, displays, audio sensing, computer vision, scene reconstruction, graphics animation, UX, haptics, machine learning, software and hardware engineering, social interactions, material sciences and perceptual psychology—all of it crucial to the upcoming generation of future VR/AR devices.

The post Oculus Research Becomes ‘Facebook Reality Labs’, Creating “further and faster” Leaps in AR/VR appeared first on Road to VR.

Posted on

Oculus on Half Dome Prototype: ‘don’t expect to see everything in a product anytime soon’

At Facebook’s F8 developer conference Oculus revealed a glimpse at an intriguing new headset prototype dubbed ‘Half Dome’. Including a 140 degree field of view, varifocal displays, and what appears to be eye-tracking, the prototype is a tantalizing peek at the company’s research and what may lay ahead of us—just don’t expect it everything we saw “anytime soon,” says Oculus co-founder and Head of Rift Nate Mitchell.

Besides the fact that Oculus is undoubtedly working on a second flagship PC VR headset, nothing is known about it thus far. And derailing the hypetrain somewhat, Mitchell took to Reddit to address comments reeling from the prospect of Half Dome’s technology making its way into a potential Rift 2.

Image courtesy Facebook

“Seriously, a varifocal display?” writes Reddit user ‘DarthBuzzard’. “I honestly expected that to be CV3 and CV2 would have simulated depth of focus rather than full depth of focus. Looks like things really are moving faster than expected!”

In response, Mitchell had this to say:

“[Maria Fernandez Guajardo, Head of Product Management, Core Tech at Oculus] covered a bunch of areas of long term research for us. This is just a peek into some feature prototypes we’ve been working on. However, don’t expect to see all of these technologies in a product anytime soon.”

While this doesn’t entirely negate a prospective Rift 2 with varifocal displays, 140 degree field of view, and eye-tracking (or any combination of the three), being able to productize all of these these things into a single headset will likely take time to get right.

SEE ALSO
Oculus Claims Breakthrough in Hand-tracking Accuracy

VR headsets are ideally robust devices built to withstand the daily abuses from their owners, and varifocal displays, which physically move to accommodate a wider range of focus, introduce a number of moving parts that are constantly moving in tandem with the user’s gaze. These parts undoubtedly also complicate manufacturing and increase the overall cost of the device too.

 

Eye-tracking is however something that is both physically robust, and probably much cheaper to make for Oculus considering last year’s acquisition of Eye Tribe, a Denmark-based eye-tracking startup which advertised “the world’s most affordable eye tracker” as far back as 2013.

As for the wider field of view: it’s still uncertain if the varifocal displays were a key technology in obtaining the 140 degree FOV, although Fernandez Guajardo stated at F8 that the company’s “continued innovation in lenses has allowed [Oculus] to pack all of this technology and still keep the Rift form-factor.” One of the images shown at F8 does show a much larger pair of supposed Fresnel lenses—so not a stark impossibility either.

Image courtesy Facebook

At GDC last year, Head of Oculus PC VR Brendan Iribe stated that Rift will remain the company’s flagship VR headset for “at least the next two years.” Mincing Iribe’s statement somewhat, that puts a potential Rift 2 launching sometime in 2019 at its earliest.

We hope to see more at Oculus Connect 5 which should be sometime in Fall 2018.

The post Oculus on Half Dome Prototype: ‘don’t expect to see everything in a product anytime soon’ appeared first on Road to VR.

Posted on

Oculus’ ‘Half Dome’ Uses Mechanised Lenses to Improve VR Visualisation

It’s the second day of the Facebook Developers Conference (F8) 2018 and if you thought that all the virtual reality (VR) news was over then think again, with Oculus detailing some of the technology its been working on. Some of this has been to do with the visualisation of VR and the comfort felt by players, namely being able to focus on different objects at different distances which has been achieved via a varifocal mechanism called Half Dome.

Oculus Half Dome

Currently all VR headsets have a fixed focal plane, so when a users eye focuses on what’s displayed at a reasonable distance it’s in focus. Most developers work on a principle of around two meters away from a player, so when items are brought much closer they become blurred and unreadable.

With Oculus Half Dome the screens can move to correct this, improving both visual comfort, clarity and up close sharpness. Further benefits also include a wider field of view (FoV), increased from Oculus Rift’s 110 degrees to 140 degrees. And Oculus has managed to fit all of this mechanism inside the Oculus Rift form factor without unnecessary weight addition.

Oculus-Testing

Maria Fernandez Guajardo, Head of Product Management, at Oculus notes in the F8 keynote that even with this moving mechanism strapped to your face no noise or vibrations can be felt by the user.

This is very much still in early development by the looks of it but showcases some of the promising work Oculus is doing to advance VR hardware development. As day 2 of F8 continues VRFocus will bring you further updates from the conference.

Posted on

Oculus Reveals 140 Degree VR Headset Prototype with Varifocal Displays

Oculus today at F8 overviewed some of the latest VR technology that they’d been working on internally. Among the projects mentioned is the ‘Half Dome’ prototype, a Rift-like headset with a 140 degree field of view, varifocal displays, and what appears to be eye-tracking.

Maria Fernandez Guajardo, Head of Product Management, Core Tech at Oculus, revealed the Half Dome prototype after saying that her job is to help take the research that’s happening within the company and turn it into practical building blocks for future projects.

A Rift-like field of view compared to the Half Dome prototype. | Image courtesy Facebook

Guajardo said that the Half Dome prototype manages to pack a 140 degree field of view and varifocal displays into a Rift-like form factor. The wide field of view appears to be thanks to new Fresnel lenses, and the appearance of eye-tracking technology on the headset may also play a role.

Two prototype headsets, apparently with eye-tracking. The left appears to be using Rift-like lenses while the right uses new lenses which are said to have a 140 degree field of view. | Image courtesy Facebook

While eye-tracking may benefit the field of view improvements, it’s almost certainly utilized primarily in the Half Dome prototype’s varifocal displays, which physically move back and forth to dynamically shift the focus of the optical system.

Image courtesy Facebook

Doing so allows for sharp imagery even with nearfield objects, a problem that Guajardo says plagues the consumer headsets of today. She said that much attention has been paid to making Half Dome’s display actuation system silent and otherwise imperceptible to the user.

In the last year, Oculus has detailed a range of research projects relating to varifocal technology.

Correction (5/2/18): An earlier version of this article stated that Guajardo was part of Facebook. While Oculus is owned by Facebook, Guajardo is actually part of Oculus. This has been corrected in the article above. Hat tip to Reddit user Heaney555 who pointed this out.

The post Oculus Reveals 140 Degree VR Headset Prototype with Varifocal Displays appeared first on Road to VR.