HOME OF VIRTUAL REALITY
Ever wondered what all those techie words and acronyms actual mean?... well you're in the right place to find out! We have an extensive list of the most common tech words used in Virtual Reality (VR) and Augmented Reality (AR)
Successful head tracking allows a headset to determine not only your head’s rotation, as you look side to side or up or down, but also pinpoints your head’s movement in space. This allows you to duck and lean in VR. For more, see position tracking/positional tracking.
A headset with eye tracking does exactly what it says on the tin. Tracking your eye movement is important as it opens up new doors for VR outside of gaming. For example, it could make for a more realistic telepresence, enabling realistic eye contact between avatars. Effective eye tracking can also make for crisper VR images with lower processing power, by only rendering the aspects of a scene that you’re looking at in high resolution. This reflects what our eyes already do naturally: we see most clearly in the centre of our FOV, while the periphery of our vision is blurry.
This can refer to a variety of issues with headsets: in regards to the lenses themselves, the blind spot could be an area outside of the display, or a part of the display which can’t be easily seen by the human eye. Or, it could refer to issues with motion tracking in positions where your movements can’t be detected. For example, if your head is turned away and you are making hand gestures outside of the sensors’ FOV.
This term can be a little misleconfusing, since it relates not to the length of the headset lens, but to the distance in millimetres from the point where rays of light converge at the back of the lens to the front, which creates the image you then see. This number directly affects the FOV and how magnified objects on screen are. A pair of lenses with a lower focal length will have a narrower FOV and higher magnification, and vice versa.
Currently, many manufacturers offer headsets with a fixed focal length - which means that virtual objects are clearest only at a certain distance: about an arm’s length away. This can cause eye strain when looking at things close up, or from a great distance, which has spurred development into varifocal lenses.
The IPD, or interpupillary distance is exactly what it sounds like: the distance in millimetres from the centre of one pupil to the other. Outside of the VR world, your optician will measure this with a ruler during an eye test.Knowing your IPD is important when using a VR headset. The lenses can be moved, either manually or using special software, to match your IPD. This reduces eye strain, shadowing and distortion. Just think of how you would use a pair of binoculars: the two lenses can be pivoted around a central point, allowing you to match the lenses up with the centre of your eyes.
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