Just providing an accurate projection of the visual field to the eye's doesn't solve the problem completely. Visual perception is not a passive mechanism, our eyes 'explore' the visual field through quick movements and readjustments and this process inherently locks together the proprioceptive signals from the ciliary and ocular muscles to the stream of information from the retina. By only providing screens, we can't simulate this process in a natural way and our body will detect it.

Similarly - our vestibular sense is strongly tied to our experiences of our body moving through the world. Just using a blanket stimulation of electrodes on the skin will not recreate these signals in anywhere near a convincing enough manner to fool the brain's perceptual processing.

All of our sensory perceptions are strongly linked together - if just one is perturbed in an unconvincing way (try wearing glasses that aren't prescribed to you for a while), our brain will do our "caveman brain" thing and make us sick.

Even your example is wrong. You can in fact adjust to glasses of the wrong prescription. People who need glasses have deformed eyes which is basically like having the wrong prescription. The brain adjusts, and people can go without glasses without vomiting everywhere.

The nausea reaction is an issue, but it doesn't affect the entire population. I have friends who can't play video games because of motion sickness, but no one argues that video games can't be commercially successful. And various tricks like removing head bob, adjusting the field of view, and adding a virtual "nose", have been shown to significantly alleviate that.

That's the point of the light field displays GP mentioned. They also encode depth allowing the eyes to refocus on the correct depth corresponding to the object's virtual position.

Put differently, a LFD reconstructs photon paths, as if you were looking into a window facing the recorded object.

The remaining engineering problem is that those microlens arrays step down the effective resolution of the display, so you need much higher DPI to get the same sharpness as a non-LFD would get you.

Who told you he refers to 1989 headsets only? The military also has 2016 $80,000 (and more) headsets.

One other interesting thing to note (at least on the HTC Vive) is the majority of the content for the platform is focused on standing / walking with motion in real life matching 1-1 with motion in VR. Which both stops a major source of motion sickness and rules out entire categories of software like flight simulators, which seems to be his entire work history.

I knew as soon as he mentioned military VR results that his case was going to be based on ancient and inferior hardware and outdated results, and include no actual results or even first-hand experience with a Vive. (At the most generous reading of the article, he worked with a DK1 a while ago.)

I've tried a couple seated flight-sims. You simply can't see distant objects as well as you'd expect due to the low resolution of the panels, which is far more important in flight sims than with most other things. I can't say I got sick, but it didn't feel real to me, and I can see how others might get sick.

4K and, later, 8K VR should solve a lot of that.

Whoa! I have been kind of watching the whole VR thing from the sidelines, and I didn't expect this to be even anything somebody was even thinking about.

Thanks for the hint! Are there any specific projects that you'd think are worth mentioning here ?

The next problem will be figuring out how to render 10000x5000 at 120hz in realtime on consumer GPUs. It will definitely require insanely beefy rigs to accomplish.

I've been playing modern games at 1440p 120hz since 2011. We've been at 4K and 5K 120hz-capable (on the GPU-side) for quite a while already as well.

It's hard to imagine not being able to hit >8K 120hz in under 500W once we get GPUs on the 7nm node.

Of course the actual displays aren't here yet, but the compute resources needed aren't out of reach.

WOW interesting: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=OlXYqfQHNuA