Oculus Rift: A VR headset that (potentially) doesn't suck

http://www.kickstarter.com/projects/...-into-the-game

Virtual reality headsets have historically been very disappointing. While the concept has been fun and interesting, the technological realities never quite lived up to expectations, and hardware developers largely gave up on research into this kind of device. However, it's been long enough that display technology has caught up to our ambitions. So, where are our VR headsets? Well, hobbyist Palmer Luckey asked that same question, and when he couldn't find a good answer, he decided to build one himself. He and his team have built a prototype, and they just launched a Kickstarter campaign to distribute developer kits. The campaign blew past its $250,000 goal in hours. What's interesting about this particular campaign is that Palmer took the Oculus Rift to various development studios and managed to get enthusiastic endorsements from some big names, including Cliff Bleszinski, Gabe Newell, and John Carmack.

I'm excited, after having toyed with the idea of making my own full-FOV VR headset for a while (which I promptly gave up on after reading about John Carmack's similar project).

Anyway, I have two gripes with it:

1: It doesn't seem to take eyeball movement into account, which (I think) would cause some interesting distortions.

2: The resolution is far too low to render anything that looks remotely close to reality. Based on http://www.clarkvision.com/articles/eye-resolution.html, a "safe" estimate for the resolution of the full FOV of the human eye seems to be around 700 megapixels. Assuming hemispherical displays around each eye with a radius of 3 cm (1.18 inches), it works out to 800 million pixels per inch, which is roughly 6-7 orders of magnitude more than what modern displays will produce.

Of course, in standard 16:9 terms, 700 megapixels amounts to a 35280x19845 pixel resolution, so it's not hard to see why there would be very significant hardware issues to make good use of such a display, too...

I'm kinda excited for this. Though I don't see the need for more resolution then is produced by a Bluray disk. To me, that looks realistic enough.

EDIT by KA: Woops, I edited your post instead of posting my own.

When it's so close to your eyes you'll notice a difference more readily.

I was never one to be annoyed by graphics.

It may not be perfect, but I am def intrigued by this device.

Agreed. I'm the kind of guy that turns down the graphics for best speed. So the bad resolution won't bother me at all. So long as it isn't as huge and bulky as previous VR devices have been.