OCULUS RIFT IS BREATHING NEW LIFE INTO THE DREAM OF VIRTUAL REALITY
[Philip Lelyveld comment: This looks amazing.]
Instead of a 30- or 40-degree field of view (a screen with edges), the Rift offers a 110-degree field of view. There’s no discernible edge to the Rift’s curved 7”, 1280 x 800 display. The screen is split into 640 x 800 halves, lowering the resolution per eye, but allowing the world to be rendered stereoscopically—that is pairing two side-by-side images viewed from slightly different angles (parallax) to make things appear 3D. You’re fully immersed in the game-world.
The headset uses a gyroscope, accelerometer, and magnetometer to translate head movements into changes in perspective in the virtual world. In the past, high latency, or how much time it takes the system to translate physical movements into virtual ones, has been a limiting factor. Carmack believes the “magic number for immersive VR” is 20 millisecond latency. Get it faster than 20 milliseconds, and humans can’t detect a delay. (For more detail, check out this dense meditation on VR latency on Carmack’s blog.)
See the full story here: http://singularityhub.com/2013/05/31/oculus-rift-is-breathing-new-life-into-the-dream-of-virtual-reality/?curator=MediaReDEF