Comment on This may be the best way to play 2D games*
theparadox@lemmy.world 15 hours agoThe stereoscopic display forces your eyes to focus as if the content were further away. It’s wild. I don’t need glasses for things up close, but I have to jam my glasses into the headsets to see properly. I assume the opposite would be true, but if you have experienced otherwise please let me know. I’m curious.
ericwdhs@discuss.online 13 hours ago
Interestingly enough, the focal length of the lenses and perceived distance due to stereoscopic parallax are completely unrelated.
The lenses can’t reshape themselves, so the screens have to always sit at a constant perceived distance from your eyes, typically set around the middle of where the eyes are used to focusing, about 2 meters away. This isn’t a problem, because the effect of the brain taking depth cues from parallax is much stronger, so the focal length detail just fades into the background.
What this all means though is that whether or not you need glasses in a VR headset is entirely dependent on whether you need glasses to see objects 2 meters away outside VR. This remains true even when objects in VR are much closer or farther as perceived by stereoscopic vision.
theparadox@lemmy.world 11 hours ago
Thanks!
I didn’t think the perceived distance mattered - as you say, things rendered as “close” were not easier to see without glasses when I explored this phenomenon.
However, I didn’t realize that it was all due to the focal length of the lenses. I know very little about lenses and vision.
So the lenses essentially make it so that the headset screens feel ~2 meters away, as far as your ability to see things near/far?
Thanks!
ericwdhs@discuss.online 10 hours ago
Yep, you got it.