Eh. The primary obstacles to VR right now are intercompatibility and cost. Facebook’s bullshit is near the right price range, but it’s from Facebook, so it’s bullshit. Everything else is wildly overpriced for what remains a niche secondary gizmo atop already-expensive gaming setups, and it only works on one brand of gaming setup. All these motherfuckers took a scalpel to the nascent industry to slice up their tiny fragment of an itty-bitty pie.
I will tell companies this for free: use a point light source and focus becomes trivial. You don’t need three inches of fancy folded optics. The proper Gumpei Yokoi approach is a textbook drawing of one lens, a liquid crystal panel, and a dot that emits light.
I’ve been telling companies this for free: use intermediate voxels and performance becomes irrelevant. Toy hardware can throw sprites at a zillion frames a second, with up-to-the-nanosecond head-tracking. Make games emit that cheap 3D data instead of giving them direct framebuffer access.
Of course if these people were serious, they’d use lightfield displays. Stick a grid of tiny lenses onto a high-res screen and you don’t need focus because you’re emitting a hologram. Nvidia had tech demos for this, an entire decade ago. The hardware is dirrrt cheap. But for some fucking reason we’re still acting like Palmer’s cheap hack remains state-of-the-art. Just stick fancier pancake polarizing birdbath Zeiss optics on this Google Cardboard thingamajig. More pixels! More pixels!
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