[HN Gopher] Eyeway's Retina-Tracking Foveated Display
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Eyeway's Retina-Tracking Foveated Display
Author : PaulHoule
Score : 103 points
Date : 2021-09-10 14:57 UTC (8 hours ago)
(HTM) web link (kguttag.com)
(TXT) w3m dump (kguttag.com)
| WhatIsDukkha wrote:
| Always love a new Karl Guttag article, and I'm pleased to see
| people doing all this fundamental engineering and science work.
|
| The more of them I read the more I tend to think that in ten
| years the best solution is going to be VR with video passthrough.
| That seems (as a layperson) to have a very clear (at least
| comparatively) engineering path to delivering a high quality
| experience.
|
| So many (seemingly unsolveable) issues with AR displays.
|
| This doesn't even touch the software side which seems to need AGI
| to actually deliver the AR that people actually expect in the
| end. The trivial things for AR are better served by smartphones
| and watches for the medium and longterm still.
| nradov wrote:
| There's probably also a market for smart eyeglasses which don't
| deliver a real AR experience but just use a tiny laser to
| project a few data fields on the retina. There have been a few
| attempts already that were a bit too early like North Focals
| that didn't take off but I think the technology will be
| suitable for mass market adoption soon.
| WhatIsDukkha wrote:
| The low rez displays have been around in different forms for
| years.
|
| Whenever I see them I have trouble coming up with actual
| applications I would want to use them for that aren't better
| supplied by say a smartwatch?
| nradov wrote:
| Alternative to a smartwatch for people who don't like
| wearing watches, or can't wear them in some situations.
| Alternative to Bluetooth headsets. Heads up display for
| workers and athletes who don't want to keep glancing down
| at a watch.
| xwdv wrote:
| One time when I was a teen I woke up and my brain wasn't doing
| saccadic masking for a few seconds, I would move my head left and
| right and things would motion blur. Eventually it turned back on
| though. Any idea what that was?
| modeless wrote:
| Saccadic masking isn't about head movement. That would be a
| problem with your vestibulo-ocular reflex. I'd say a likely
| cause would be an issue with your inner ear, perhaps temporary
| benign paroxysmal positional vertigo caused by a bit of debris
| coming loose inside.
| arthurcolle wrote:
| > temporary benign paroxysmal positional vertigo
|
| Me: ...
|
| checks profile
|
| > modeless: AR / VR at Oculus
|
| Ah, I see
| modeless wrote:
| Haha, actually I had an episode of BPPV myself, not related
| to my VR work. Triggered by a day of snorkeling, of all
| things.
| short_sells_poo wrote:
| I feel that AR/VR are a very interesting intersection of
| medicine, biology, mathematics and physics. Given you
| actually work in the industry, what is your experience in
| this regard? Do people have to have some knowledge in all
| these fields, or do you rather have strongly focused
| specialists in each who then collaborate?
|
| E.g. you clearly need some biology/medical knowhow to be
| able to diagnose various problems that arise in the human
| part of the system, no?
| modeless wrote:
| Just off the cuff, I'd say specialists are important in
| some areas. But you won't get very far without
| generalists who can see the whole picture, and study to
| become specialists where necessary. In a new field, the
| right specialists may not exist.
|
| I wouldn't say you need a medical degree to diagnose VR-
| specific biological issues. A lot of this stuff hasn't
| been particularly well studied so you're going to be
| discovering new things rather than applying existing
| knowledge. On the other hand optics specialists are very
| important; optics is very deep and existing knowledge is
| very relevant.
| gentleman11 wrote:
| I can't wait for smart TVs to use eye tracking to profile people
| and for employers and insurance to buy the data. /s
|
| Eg, I'm sure some potential employers for customer service jobs
| would love to know if their candidate had autism, as long as the
| data was framed by the seller (by some ml) as "subject has some
| antisocial tendencies" /s
|
| https://magazine.medlineplus.gov/article/eye-tracking-techno...
| ricardobeat wrote:
| They already do, at least in commercial settings.
|
| But this article is about foveated rendering that is able to
| track eye movement to keep the hi-res area under focus. The
| eye-tracking tech is the least interesting part of it!
| dr_dshiv wrote:
| Would it be possible to have a watch display (for instance) that
| appears larger than the actual screen of the watch by using
| lasers (and eye tracking) to paint the display directly at the
| retina?
| tgb wrote:
| I was going to say impossible, reasoning from how I understand
| your eye's lens to focus. But that doesn't rule out the
| possibility of it working if _out-of-focus_. If you look at a
| small point light source and let your eyes go out of focus, the
| light smears to a larger range. The shape and texturing of that
| range depend upon the light source: for example search for
| bokeh shots during a partial solar eclipse. This should be
| emulatable with a small projector.
|
| However the size up of the image should be no bigger than what
| you see when you let your eyes go out of focus, which isn't
| really that much. And you'd have to find a way to make your
| eyes want to focus like that, which could be tricky.
| [deleted]
| PaulHoule wrote:
| Nope.
|
| I am interesting in pushing the limits of persistence of vision
| displays.
|
| I'm pretty sure you could catch a driver's attention with an
| array of LED strips stretched out over the road. They'd have to
| be looking in the right place with their eyes focused at the
| right distance to see an image but I bet you could get them to
| hit the brakes anyway.
|
| (If that fails there is always the digital flashbang...)
| c7DJTLrn wrote:
| It's exciting to see that there's companies other than Facebook
| out there doing this kind of experimentation and research.
| "Realistic" VR, if it can be pulled off, will be the next
| frontier of computing. I'm more sceptical of AR because it is
| much harder to achieve and not as useful in my opinion.
| djrogers wrote:
| > not as useful in my opinion
|
| As someone who spends less than 51% of my waking hours staring
| at a computer, I strongly disagree with this assertion. Vr has
| the potential to change the way I use my computer, but AR has
| the potential to change the way I perceive and interact with
| the _rest of the world_.
| wongarsu wrote:
| AR with the eye tracking necessary for foveating has the
| potential to completely replace smartphones, just control a
| virtual display with your eyes. And that's one of the less
| interesting applications. I'm willing to bet AR is the future
| (but I'm not at all willing to bet when that future will be)
| heyitsguay wrote:
| Why not useful? It seems to me that AR is indeed much harder to
| achieve (well), but incredibly more useful than VR.
| jayd16 wrote:
| By definition the useful parts of AR are virtual. There is a
| large overlap in AR and VR ux. AR let's you compute on the go
| but how useful is that really? If virtual interactions are
| productive wouldn't you setup a space a la desktop computing?
|
| That said AR includes other tech like environment
| understanding that you might consider much more useful than
| immersive visuals and spatial interactions alone.
|
| I can see both sides and I expect things to move hand in
| hand.
| abraxas wrote:
| Is this more or less what Magic Leap attempted and ultimately
| failed to deliver?
| vosper wrote:
| Magic Leap is still going, they're trying to sell to businesses
| now. I've no idea how they're doing, though I expect they'll
| need to make a lot of sales to recoup all the investors money.
| modeless wrote:
| No. Magic Leap succeeded in delivering a technically impressive
| AR experience with multiple (2) focal planes. Their failure was
| in not realizing that the overall experience wouldn't be useful
| enough to build a business with enough revenue to support the
| development cost. That's due to a combination of factors like
| low brightness, small FOV, weight, cost, and difficulty of
| developing world/object tracking for compelling AR apps.
|
| Also Microsoft totally stole their thunder with Hololens coming
| out first.
| m3kw9 wrote:
| In the future, imagine most people in the developed world wearing
| frames till contacts with a display come along.
| nradov wrote:
| Smart contact lenses already exist in prototype form.
|
| https://www.mojo.vision/mojo-lens
| georgewsinger wrote:
| Really cool to see advances/research in foveated display
| techniques.
|
| Simula's Portable Linux VR headset (www.simulavr.com) is planning
| on having a rudimentary eye tracking/foveated rendering system.
|
| One of the most important long-term barriers to widespread VR
| adoption for office work/programming is matching & surpassing the
| quality of what can be displayed on traditional (e.g.) 4K
| monitors. It's hard to justify spending 14 hours a day working in
| a VR headset when the text quality is visibly less sharp than
| comparable traditional screens. Advances need to be made.
| nradov wrote:
| Why would anyone want the hassle of wearing a VR headset for
| routine office work? It does nothing to improve productivity
| for most tasks. The value of VR is in other use cases.
| WhatIsDukkha wrote:
| Open office plans and hotdesking are two miserable and
| widespread trends that VR might help with...
| RamRodification wrote:
| What if the "hassle" was solved though? If we get
| comfortable, light weight, easy-on/off HMDs with good enough
| resolution I think it will be a game changer.
|
| I work from home with two monitors. If I could pop on a pair
| of goggles and get infinite screen space I think that could
| definitely improve my productivity.
| piyh wrote:
| It'd give me whiteboard sessions back with my coworkers. The
| non-productivity boosting feeling of hanging out in the same
| room. The productivity boosting of having as many displays
| wherever I want them.
| jjoonathan wrote:
| I disagree. I think the minimal viable HUD is quite minimal,
| because most of the value is in the "Heads Up" rather than the
| "Display."
|
| Consider a clip compilation of people walking into poles and
| tripping into fountains while looking down at their phone. What
| were they doing, and could your MVP AR glasses have supported
| it? If the answer is "yes," you have a product.
| CharlesW wrote:
| > _I think the minimal viable HUD is quite minimal, because
| most of the value is in the "Heads Up" rather than the
| "Display."_
|
| You're thinking of AR, while the parent is talking about VR.
| They're pretty different use cases, and some of those VR use
| cases need significantly high resolutions to unlock.
| jjoonathan wrote:
| Yep, strange, could have sworn it said AR, and that there
| was a sibling comment discussing exactly this. Ah well.
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(page generated 2021-09-10 23:01 UTC)