I hesitate to call presence a buzzword because I've felt it (if only briefly), but then again big data is both real and a buzzword, so I guess presence can be too. However, I haven't seen the latter used in a bullshit way very often yet. Usually the people who use the word are pretty serious about VR and cautious about saying they felt presence.
I like the example of standing at the edge of something in VR and feeling the feeling you get in your stomach when you stand on the edge of a tall building. This happened to me in part of the HTC/Valve Vive demo where you stand on a shipwreck underwater.
I think more subtle examples are more interesting, though. E.g., when you're just standing in a room in VR, and you shift your weight slightly from one foot to the other (which moves your head slightly, of course), and the lighting is just right and something clicks in your head and for a second you forget you have a headset on — it's a bizarre feeling and very cool.
It's parts of your lower brain aligning to convince you you're in a virtual world, and while it is a spectrum you really need a high end headset to experience it. Abrash himself mainly dismissed VR's potential prior to experiencing it.
I've interpreted presence as "how much can you fool the brain that you really are there".
The screen-door effect is still moderately high in DK2. I've heard the CV1 has much reduced the size of the pixels, so the effect is greatly reduced.
Also the refresh also needs to be jacked up further. I'd prefer 120hz or 240hz. That would assist in faster and more seamless head-tracking. I don't think HDMI can handle that much bandwidth though. I could be wrong.
Aside) The screendoor effect is the effect of magnifying pixels in a LCD screen so you can see the pixels along with the interstitial black space where the pixels arent. The black space creates black lines like a screen door. Your eyes will then flip on focusing on the image displayed and the screen door, losing the feeling of depth and presence.
The increased framerate only helps is the latency is low enough. If there is a very high framerate but the frames lag a few 10's of milliseconds behind the movement of the head of the user then that won't help one bit.
Of course. Ideally, head tracking would be locked to the latency no greater than the time between a frame.
240hz is only 4.16 ms, which is still within human perception of view. Ideally, I'd like 1khz refresh, but that's going to be a very long time away. I do remember an HN article recently discussing a 1khz 8bit screen with touch input running at 1khz as well. The comparison was fantastic and I believe also relevant.
A VR simulation where you are on top of a high tower/building, and you are physically unable to take a leap forward because your amygdala won't let you, that is VR presence.
I like the example of standing at the edge of something in VR and feeling the feeling you get in your stomach when you stand on the edge of a tall building. This happened to me in part of the HTC/Valve Vive demo where you stand on a shipwreck underwater.
I think more subtle examples are more interesting, though. E.g., when you're just standing in a room in VR, and you shift your weight slightly from one foot to the other (which moves your head slightly, of course), and the lighting is just right and something clicks in your head and for a second you forget you have a headset on — it's a bizarre feeling and very cool.