Sony senior engineer Richard Marks on why the headset offers such clear images and interesting ergonomics
TIME spoke with Sony Senior Research Engineer Dr. Richard Marks about the new platform (Marks has been with Sony for 17 years, and played a central role in the inception of Sony’s EyeToy and PlayStation Move motion controllers). In our chat, he offered a high-level overview of how the technology works, and what drove the company to make certain choices regarding it.
“There’s two basic things here, the panel and the lenses. Those are the two main things that affect visual quality,” says Marks.
Our panel just has a better red, green and blue ratio compared to the blackness. That’s one factor. Having more light-emitting portions of the panel and less of those black circuit electronics is good.”
“And then you have the refresh rate, the screen update rate, which for us is 120 frames per second.
“The next thing is the optics, and the optics should be really well matched to the pixels. In our headset they’re blowing everything up but also softening the view, so it looks like a continuous image and you don’t see the discrete pixels.
“And the other part of the optics component is that there’s something called the eye box, and that’s about how much you can move your eyes around in front of the lenses and still get a good image.
[HMD design]...having it be balanced and not pulling your neck is probably the most important thing.”
“Also, and this varies by culture, but there’s a strong bias to not having anything touching your face.
“One of the biggest things is that it has the new camera, and it’s a higher resolution stereo camera, so it can triangulate the depth better.
See the full story here: http://time.com/4520123/playstation-vr-virtual-reality-headset/