If you follow MfA's link, the glasses aren't at all heavy or cumbersome. I recall these appearing on the Gadget Show, and with the heavy gubbins moved towards the back of the specs, they shouldn't be any less comfortable than some good headphones.
VR, would Nintendo have the balls to try it again?
- Thread starter MfA
- Start date
If a disability is that mainstream, it'll be accomodated. A tiny fraction of the potential market can't use a dual stick controller, so they're not considered worth supporting, and I believe it's left to third-party solultions to enable games for them where possible. short sightedness as a disability afflicts a large percentage, including most of the geeks who design these techs because they're sat in front of monitors 24/7 inventing technology, so of course they're going to accomodate glasses wearers or just not design a tech they themselves can't use!
It was an example. There are lots of disabilities that lower your ability to use a controller, especially unwieldy ones such as wii/DS.
Hell, I have essential tremors and even that interferes with my ability to use them.
Then there's arthritis, missing a hand, injuries, etc.
And I was pointing out that its an example that is horribly out of scale with the proportions of people that wear corrective lenses, who are in fact a majority in the developed world. If you want to have mass appeal, you better build your VR goggles with the knowledge that most of the people in your target market wear corrective lenses.
Well there are glasses and contacts. I think a large % of people who wear glasses will also have contact lenses.
Also lasik is getting cheaper and cheaper.
However I don't see it as any diffrent than the push towards 3d. Enable it on the tv and enable it on the vr head sets. If i have to buy $100 3d glasses why not go whole hog and get $150 vr glasses that bring me into the game world. Esp since vr glasses should enable head tracking .
Also lasik is getting cheaper and cheaper.
However I don't see it as any diffrent than the push towards 3d. Enable it on the tv and enable it on the vr head sets. If i have to buy $100 3d glasses why not go whole hog and get $150 vr glasses that bring me into the game world. Esp since vr glasses should enable head tracking .
Again, Its just an example. It doesnt have to be the exact same number. Where do you draw the line between the 2 groups?
Alright, lets go with your glasses example. That didnt stop the move to HD. So evidently even if the majority have it (assuming you're right) that's still enough to ignore them and keep making your product for those unaffected.
Why would glasses effect the move to HD? That makes zero sense!
Fortunately for those with corrective lenses they aren't required to strap an HD television to their head.
It makes zero sense that despite the quality of people's vision, the move to HD still happened?
Look at all the people who (sadly) can't tell the difference between SD and HD.
All I'm saying is we can't and don't take every imperfection into account for these things. Nor should be. Otherwise we'd be using black and white for the colorblind, and no audio for the deaf. We cant hold back progress for the rest of us.
One when is large enough to substantially affect sales of your console, you design with them in mind. It's a basic numbers things - if 50% of the population had essential tremors and couldn't play Wii, Wii would have been adapted to fit. That's the same reason clothes for 8 feet tall guys aren't available in highstreet stores, because so few people are affected by gigantism that it's not economical to target them.
Of course it didn't because the solution is to wear glasses or contacts that doesn't interfere with the game. Likewise asthma. You don't need to design sedate games for Kinect because a substantial part of the population will get all wheezy jumping around, because they have very effective medication to control their condition and bring them into the norm. A normal console can be used normally by these groups without special consideration. The moment your console can't be used by a large group, you need to factor that in. If a VR headset cannot be used by glasses wearers, you've lost half you potential market. Why invest in such a product when the money could be spent elsewhere with a product useable by 99.999% of the public? Now if VR were that compelling that the take-up in the non-glasses population was strong enough, you'd have a financial reason to ignore those with visual problems. That'd be quite the gamble and no company will take it!
"This product requires good vision. Glasses wearers will either need contacts or laser surgery."
Doesn't strike me as a good tagline to help sell your product. Of the people I know maybe 1/4 have contacts. I don't know what the real figures are like. However, the best solution isn't difficult, and it's to adjust the focal length of the image so it works with wonky eyes. No need to alienate glasses wearers.
As for the OP: yes, but I wager not anytime soon.
My theory is that the best system I could think of would work something like this:
1. you have two curved panels in front of your eyes that make pixels look the same size no matter where your eye moves and covers most of your field of vision.
2. the display tech of whatever device is sending the image feed knows about your eyes and adjusts its image so that any distortion they have is compensated for. My guess is that this should be possible in theory at least, as your glasses refract light such that it compensates for your eyes problems. Then, why not make display panels that can send light in the correct way?
3. the VR glasses come with cameras for each eye that you can look at the world with, and the feed of these cameras can be mixed with or modified with the computer generated graphics. Crucially, this feed is already manipulated digitally to be corrected for your particular eyesight as well.
I don't know how easy it would be for these panels to show a stereo image that your eyes can deal with properly, but I reckon it should be possible? I've never so far heard of any display technology that does something like this to be honest, but I can't immediately think of why it would be impossible.
On the other hand, these days it's fairly easy to quickly and automatically determine your eyesight deficiencies, so this part could be automatically handled, if you don't care for typing the correction values into the device manually in its 'settings'.
But I don't expect something like this to be ready for affordable mass production anytime soon. And the fact that the army says they expect this to be useable for next year, is generally an indication that consumer grade/affordable stuff is a ways off yet.
My theory is that the best system I could think of would work something like this:
1. you have two curved panels in front of your eyes that make pixels look the same size no matter where your eye moves and covers most of your field of vision.
2. the display tech of whatever device is sending the image feed knows about your eyes and adjusts its image so that any distortion they have is compensated for. My guess is that this should be possible in theory at least, as your glasses refract light such that it compensates for your eyes problems. Then, why not make display panels that can send light in the correct way?
3. the VR glasses come with cameras for each eye that you can look at the world with, and the feed of these cameras can be mixed with or modified with the computer generated graphics. Crucially, this feed is already manipulated digitally to be corrected for your particular eyesight as well.
I don't know how easy it would be for these panels to show a stereo image that your eyes can deal with properly, but I reckon it should be possible? I've never so far heard of any display technology that does something like this to be honest, but I can't immediately think of why it would be impossible.
On the other hand, these days it's fairly easy to quickly and automatically determine your eyesight deficiencies, so this part could be automatically handled, if you don't care for typing the correction values into the device manually in its 'settings'.
But I don't expect something like this to be ready for affordable mass production anytime soon. And the fact that the army says they expect this to be useable for next year, is generally an indication that consumer grade/affordable stuff is a ways off yet.