[Cushman]

Carmack answered this in a comment:

The display is a single 1280x800 panel; each eye only sees a 640x800 image stretched across the huge field of view. The perceived resolution is therefore much lower than even previous generation consumer HMDs. If you are looking for high resolution, this isn't for you. For immersion, the high FOV is much, much more important, though.

Those are the prototype specs, mind.

[gavanwoolery]

I have used high and low-res VR and stereoscopic devices. It's not really that bad using a low-res one, latency is a much bigger factor. High latency causes motion sickness and overall crappy response/experience. That said, 1280x800 is actually pretty decent, and allows for high frame rates (try rendering even 1080p in stereoscopic mode at 60 fps -- not an easy feat.

[druidsbane]

That's actually the size of the panel. The resolution for each eye is half that, so 640x800 per eye. From the pictures I've seen to try and emulate it by printing a game render on paper and holding it a few cm away it looks pretty good :)

[ghostfish]

Thanks for the info. So it's about the same resolution as the current generation of existing video headsets, but with a much wider field of view.

[Karunamon]

Ouch.. that kind of torpedoed any interest I had in this thing. I'll stand back and let everyone else take the jump :)

[druidsbane]

I think the key difference is FOV not resolution on this which will basically put you in there, albeit not as sharp as you'd like.

There was a good point on one of the boards that HD will be hard to achieve on regular hardware just because you'd need to render at a minimum 60fps for each eye, and at 1080p few recent games will render at a smooth 120fps which this implies :) Maybe using 2 graphics cards?

[modeless]

Don't worry, Palmer Luckey has already stated that higher resolution is a top priority for the next version, and it's definitely achievable. The small high-resolution and low-latency display panels necessary are just starting to become more available. The race for retina displays in phones is helping a lot there.