FYI.

This story is over 5 years old.

Tech

Facebook Is Confident About VR, But Has Little to Show But Optical Illusions

Oculus's chief scientist's talk at Facebook's developer conference was pretty vague.
Image: Facebook​

Michael Abrash, Oculus VR's Chief Scientist, spoke at Facebook's developer event in San Francisco today to explain the problems ahead of virtual reality and why a solutions are inevitable.

One problem that's consistent with the Oculus Rift, Gear VR, Vive, and other virtual reality headsets is the "screen-door effect" which—since the display device is so close to your eyes– makes the images look pixelated.

Advertisement

Abrash said that in order to fix it and get the kind of image quality you're used to seeing on monitors and smart devices today, the headset's display would have to have a 5k-by-5k resolution, or 20 times as many pixels it currently has. To put things into perspective, the iPhone 6+ has a resolution of 1920-by-1080 pixels.

"I expect hands to be as capable in VR as they are in reality."

Higher resolutions are the least of virtual reality's problems. Abrash said that our current input devices, mouse and keyboard or in the case of gaming, game controllers, aren't enough. The solution, Abrash said, is to use our hands in virtual reality as we do in real life with the help of haptics—touch-based input that provide tactical feedback—and motion tracking cameras.

Image: Facebook

"It's going to take time and breakthroughs, but I expect hands to be as capable in VR as they are in reality," Abrash said. Valve's and HTC's VR device, Vive (which Abrash worked on before he moved from Valve to Oculus in 2014), is already making progress on this front. Their haptic and motion tracking controllers were definitely the most impressive part about the Vive demo we saw at the Game Developers Conference earlier this month.

Eventually, Abrash said, VR will need to expand beyond hands to pull in as much of the real world we need into virtual reality. He didn't mention augmented reality, but described being able to comfortably reaching out for your cup coffee while in virtual reality, or looking down and finding your keyboard where you'd expect to find it in case you needed it. Other VR headsets like MindLeap, which can switch from virtual reality to augmented reality with the help of a camera on the headset, have begun addressing this issue as well.

Advertisement

Abrash didn't say how Oculus plans to solve any of these problems. In fact, the more complicated the problem sounded, the more vague Abrash's talk became. Oculus either doesn't know or just isn't quite ready to say.

It's also odd that Abrash spent most of his stage time showing different optical illusions you'd recognize from a grade school science class about vision, or the infamous blue and black dress. The point, explained with help from a Morpheus monologue from The Matrix, is that if virtual reality is able to sufficiently fool our easily fooled senses, it will be indistinguishable from reality.

"In the long run it has the potential to recreate the full spectrum of human experiences and have huge changes for us and society as a whole," Abrash said.

According to Facebook CTO Mike Schroepfer this is all vaguely useful to Facebook, which hopes to continue its mission of connecting people across the world with the help of virtual reality. He also said that we'll be able to experience virtual reality on a shipped Oculus device this year. An Oculus representative said that the statement made for an interesting morning, but that no, Oculus hasn't officially announced that the device is coming to retail this year.

Abrash said that virtual reality isn't quite there yet and didn't offer a roadmap for how Oculus gets there, but he's confident it will because Sony, Oculus, Valve, and other companies are heavily invested in virtual reality, which he thinks is already providing compelling enough experiences to justify the pursuit.

A lot of people who've tried these headsets agree. I'm more skeptical.