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Hidden forces and sliding screens trick the senses to make VR feel more real
10.08.2023 - 22:21 / techcrunch.com
The next big thing in VR might not be higher resolution or more immersive sound, but an experience augmented by physical sensations or moving parts that fool your senses into mistaking virtual for reality. Researchers at SIGGRAPH, from Meta to international student groups, flaunted their latest attempts to make VR and AR more convincing.
The conference on computer graphics and associated domains is taking place this week in Los Angeles, and everyone from Meta to Epic to universities and movie studios were demonstrating their wares.
It’s the 50th SIGGRAPH, so a disproportionate amount of the event was dedicated to retrospectives and such like, though the expo hall was full of the latest VFX, virtual production, and motion capture hardware and software.
In the “emerging technologies” hall, or cave as the darkened, black-draped room felt, dozens of experimental approaches at the frontiers of VR seemed to describe the state of the art: visually impressive, but with immersion relying almost entirely on that. What could be done to make the illusion more complete? For many, the answer lies not in the virtual world with better sound or graphics, but in the physical one.
Meta was a large presence in the room, with its first demonstration of two experimental headsets, dubbed Butterscotch and Flamera. Flamera takes an interesting approach to “passthrough” video, but it’s Butterscotch’s “varifocal” approach that really changes things in the virtual world.
VR headsets generally comprise a pair of tiny, high-resolution displays fixed to a stack of lenses that make them appear to fill the wearer’s field of vision. This works fairly well, as anyone who has tried a recent headset can attest. But there’s a shortcoming in the simple fact that moving things closer doesn’t really allow you see them better. They remain at the same resolution, and while you might be able to make out a little more, it’s not like picking up an object and inspecting it closely in real life.
Meta’s Butterscotch prototype headset, in pieces.
Meta’s Butterscotch prototype, which I tested and grilled the researchers about, replicates that experience by tracking your gaze within the headset, and when your gaze falls on something closer, physically sliding the displays closer to your eyes. The result is shocking to anyone who has gotten used to the poor approximation of “looking up close” at something in VR.
The display only moves over a span of about 14 millimeters, a researcher at the Meta booth told me, and that’s more than enough at that range not just to create a clearer image of the up-close item — remarkably clear, I must say — but to allow the eyes to more naturally change their “accommodation” and “convergence,” the ways they naturally track and
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