Category: varjo

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Startup Aims for Retinal Resolution VR Display With 70x “effective resolution” of Today’s Headsets

Finland-based Varjo has announced a new display technology for AR and VR which the company is calling “the first human eye-resolution VR/AR/XR immersive display.” Varjo claims an “effective resolution” that’s nearly 70 times greater than the Rift and Vive.

We’ve recently seen new VR displays from both Samsung and Kopin with an impressive ~3.25x increase in resolution compared to the Rift and Vive.

Varjo however claims an effective resolution that’s nearly 70 times greater than today’s headsets. They’re doing so with an interesting display layout which combines typical VR displays with higher density micro-displays to make part of the image hyper-sharp. The company says that portion of the image achieves retinal resolution, meaning that the pixel density is so great that you can’t tell individual pixels apart.

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To achieve this, Varjo is projecting a high-resolution microdisplay into the center of a lower resolution display. The effect, as reported by The Verge, is like having a super high-resolution window right in the middle of your field of view, with lower quality everywhere else. And although the super high-resolution area is presently limited in its field of view, the visual fidelity it offers looks very impressive.

Above: Through-the-lens view of a limited portion of Varjo’s prototype headset. Below: the same view (and limited portion) of the Oculus Rift | Image courtesy Varjo

The Verge’s Sean O’Kane explains what it was like to look through the company’s prototype headset, which is built from an Oculus Rift:

Looking at them through that window in the center gave each of these scenes new life. Textures that were obscured by the Oculus’ dual 1080 x 1200 displays could now be seen in more lifelike detail. I could read individual filenames in the folders on the virtual desktop. The cockpit of the plane was especially striking. Looking at it through the Oculus displays surrounding Varjo’s tech, I couldn’t understand any of the labels on the many knobs and switches at my virtual fingertips. Looking “through” those microdisplays, though, I was able to read all of them.

O’Kane notes a few issues with the current prototype, like a notable border separating the high-resolution and low-resolution parts of the image (rather than a seamless blend between them), and issues with a mismatching framerate. According to the report, Varjo says they can fix both of these issues, and has an aggressive timeline set for what they say will be a professional-focused VR headset coming in 2018 which will be priced at “thousands of dollars.” The company also says the tech could be used for AR applications.

 

Image courtesy The Verge

 

Combining multiple displays to form a single view in a VR headset is not a new idea, but it is an interesting one. One of the biggest challenges is integrating each display in a way that forms one cohesive image. With Varjo’s present tech, the high-resolution area sticks in the middle of the field of view no matter where you move your eyes.

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With advancements in eye-tracking, it could be feasible to move the high-resolution area to wherever your eyes are pointing, and it seems this is where Varjo hopes to head in the future.

 

The post Startup Aims for Retinal Resolution VR Display With 70x “effective resolution” of Today’s Headsets appeared first on Road to VR.

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VR At Human Eye Resolution Could Be On Its Way

The field of virtual reality (VR) is still in its infancy in many ways. The technology has many directions it could head in to change and develop, but many experts and analysts agree that the view needs to be better through VR headsets before it gains wide-spread acceptance. A company comprised of former Nokia employees is trying to solve that problem.

Many currently existing and upcoming head-mounted displays (HMDs) offer HD and 4K displays, with some aiming for even higher resolution, but so far, no display has reached what is dubbed ‘human eye resolution’ – something which approaches 70 times what is currently available with most commercial VR headsets.

Most companies are tied to current display technology and need to wait for that technology to advance before any discernible improvements can be seen. A new company that has been set up by former managers at Nokia and Microsoft named Varjo is aiming to circumvent current limitations by using current technology and software in innovative ways. The CEO of Varjo, Urho Konttori previously worked on products such as Microsoft’s Lumia phones, developing the imaging technology used in the smartphone’s cameras, as such, the first goal for the company is to produce a physical product.

Comparison of details of the 3d model used in a Varjo example VR scene.

The design for Varjo’s headset involves small, extremely high-density displays in the centre, with lower solution displays on the outside left and right edges, mimicking the way the human eye and peripheral vision. The product will also make sure of Foveated Rendering technology, as used in other VR headsets, which uses eye-tracking to allow only what is currently in the user’s field of view to be fully rendered, saving on processing power.

The prototype is still in development, but a reporter at The Verge experienced a version of the technology using a retro-fitted Oculus Rift, which placed two of the small ultra-high density displays into the headset. The results allowed for a much clearer, sharper image than is usually possible with a typical VR display.

The developers at Varjo are hoping to create a version of the headset, compatible with Steam VR for release to selected industry partners later in the year, with a full consumer launch planned for some time in 2018.

VRFocus will bring you further information on the Varjo headset as it becomes available.

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Varjo Promises Human-Eye Resolutions For VR This Year

Varjo Promises Human-Eye Resolutions For VR This Year

I am standing in a virtual living room rendered via Unity. Except I am seeing things I never have before in VR. There is a virtual television on the wall to my left displaying a 4K video of a city. The floor, the couch pillows, the clothes hanging on a rack to my left, are shown in such extreme detail that I am actually seeing a life-like world. It’s a glimpse of VR’s future.

“We believe that by chasing for the human-eye resolution as fast as possible, it jump starts everyone so they can work toward the end game of VR and AR,” said Urho Konttori, founder and CEO of Varjo.

Varjo is a startup of 19 employees that is only 10 months old based in Helsinki, Finland. The talent comes from the likes of Microsoft and Nokia. This work they have done comes from their original $2M funding, with a second round of funding being pursued currently.

My experience in that Unity-based living room and other demos, using what Varjo is calling the “20/20” prototype, shows that they are working in the right direction.

They retrofitted an Oculus Rift with an extra layer of lenses inside the unit. An OLED microdisplay projects an image onto a glass plate over the Oculus lenses. That center piece is said to have 70 times the resolution of the Rift’s image.

Below is a comparison.

“The comparison is apples to apples, taken through the same sense with the same SLR. It’s a world of difference,” said Konttori. “From our point of view, looking at what professionals need from VR, you need human-eye resolution.”

This prototype is a proof-of-concept demo to be sure: the size of the ultra resolution section is on the small side, about a small fraction of the real estate of the entire VR picture (see my approximate illustration of what it felt like below). The edges are a bit jittery in the transition from one image to the other, because the microdisplay has persistence versus the Rift’s low-persistence display.

But, even with that limitation, the demos give you a sense of what VR and AR at such crazy resolutions would be like. A virtual Windows 7 desktop had file explorer open, a 4K trailer to Guardians of the Galaxy Volume 2 and AutoCAD. Whatever was centered in my view was astonishingly detailed.

A video of a prototype back in Finland showed how this tech can work with AR. Using video see-through, a person could have multiple “displays” while they work in the office, at home, or on an airplane. Another example demo from video shows someone manipulating what looks like a model of a home floating in front of them, moving furniture around, for example. Then they click a spot and the virtual home surrounds them at human scale. It looks like you are standing in a VR house that is as detailed as any that could be in a 4K video game.

Varjo wants to address the limitations of current tech.

“The problem with the VR and AR of today is, firstly, that they are all inherently low resolution. We’re talking about one one-hundredth of human-eye resolution. It’s not quite legally blind,” said Konttori. “Optical see-through systems…have narrow fields of view. It’s crippling all the time. And everything you create in AR is very hazy and artificial, ghostly. It’s not life-like. If you’re  a professional who wants to showcase a product in mixed reality, it needs to be accurately represented and not as a holographic image.”

The company is aiming for a professional market, aiming to use its tech to create a SteamVR headset that companies will use. They think they could use software and hardware gaze-tracking to move the 70X resolution section around to where you are actually looking, and not just locked in the center of the screen. The microdisplay could physically move or maybe the glass plate that receives the projection could tilt — Urho Konttori is cagey about what the final mechanism will be be like. But he wants to be clear that this isn’t foveated rendering.

“Foveated rendering is used just to decrease the quality and thus decrease the GPU consumption. Where as we are going to enhance the quality. Maybe it’s ‘foveated display’ or something like that,” said Konttori.

He stresses that the total number of pixels being pushed is less than a 4K computer monitor, and so the software can be run today on current desktops and gaming laptops.

There current schedule is to have a prototype of their own headset by the end of this year and giving away hundreds of units to partners. After some feedback and further development, the final headset is supposed to come to market by the end of 2018.

And the cost of a VR/AR headset with human-eye resolution aimed for business use?

“This will be multiple of thousands in price, but not tens of thousands,” Konttori said. “We can not say the price now because that depends on so many things between now and then. This is achievable for prosumers, but you need to be quite committed to shell out multiple thousands. But technology trickles down over time. It’s not going to be that many years until this will be available at consumer price points.”

Before they get to that consumer unit, which he says should be a standalone, untethered headset to get wide adoption, they need to have the enterprise headset finished. And that requires the aforementioned prototype coming later this year.

“It is in many ways a dev kit, but we don’t want only software developers to use it,” Konttori said of this year’s prototype. “It will also have certain limitations. We haven’t decided which compromises we make. And sometimes dev kits are also perceived to be very close to the quality of the expected product, but there will be some things that we will be improving during the next year.”

“One of the most important things is that we want to keep the schedule. We want to make it that we bring this to the attention of many interested companies, to start the next transformation of computing together.”

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