I had the same reaction, and the article only says that the effective resolution, accounting for their "pixels per degree", is something less than 1080p. Which sort of implies it is better than 720p...somewhere between the two. Plus whatever benefit blocking out the things around you in the plane has.
I'd much rather hear some reviews of the experience from run of the mill people that don't have much experience with VR.
I suppose the article does, though, at least set a reasonable expectations bar.
I see this come up a lot in hardware discussions (Megapixels come to mind) and manufacturers love to jump on this effect.
I still prefer a TV when I'm chilling at home, but the NReals work great on planes.
* They supposedly work well with Dex (Samsung/Android VR space)
* They also have a desktop app called "Nebula" that can generate up to 3 virtual monitors. Resolution low for each monitor, but it's handy for having a bunch of different material in your view.
* They can also do 3D side-by-side mode.
I also have them working (without audio) with my Playstation.
The AVP is estimated to be around 35-42PPD.
My guess is that they combine a number of signals to do the tracking, and when those signals start to disagree too much they've prioritized some signals over others. That could include things like how your eyes are tracking and other physiological signals, not just the accelerometer and various cameras.
I'll do you one better. My nephew was going to a summer camp that didn't allow the kids to bring phones or tablets. He was allowed to bring an MP3 player, tho. So I downscaled a copy of Into the Spiderverse to 432x240 (his iPod Nano's native resolution). I left the bitrate quite high (1600kps) and it looks absolutely great. Even stretched out on a full sized ipad, it's completely watchable.
I have a bit of astigmatism, but I still don't wear glasses as a routine thing, and when I watch good DVDs on my 60" TV from about 8 feet away, it's fairly rare for me to be that upset by the video quality. Even after I suck some out downsampling into mp4, it's still rare for me to actively notice. DVD encoders are fairly good now.
At this point I don't care at all if something advertises a "4K" stream because I know that it's still likely to be not all that good. Tell me the bitrate of your stream, that's what I want to know. (Assuming the use of a modern codec and quality encoder.) I can get a "4K" stream with hundreds of kilobits per second. The encoder will be crying because of the shoddy job you're making it do and the decoder will look at you like you're on crack, but by golly, 4K's worth of pixels will indeed be shoveled onto the screen.
Take an average 4k Stream from YouTube/Netflix/etc and look at the transfer size for the full duration. It's gonna be something around 1-3gb per hour from my observations.
A good 4k Video is usually around 5-10x that size and with good reason, because the resolution demands a lot of bits to make it shine, no matter how well you've encoded it
What does "high quality pixel" mean?
However, if you look at a swathe of pixels, say a 16x16 chunk, you can reasonably talk about with what fidelity that set of pixels represents the original signal, whatever that original signal was. You get into the whole perceptual coding thing which tells us that determining the human-perceived accuracy of a chunk of pixels is more than just adding up the differences, but you can take that as a suitable first approximation for thought.
High-quality pixels have minimal deviation from the source material. Low-quality pixels have significant deviation.
Tom Scott has a good video where turns up and down the quality live so you can see it in a single video: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=r6Rp-uo6HmI The video's resolution never changes, and you could say the video's bit rate never changes (it probably does because adaptive coding saves YouTube a fortune, but conceptually you could say it doesn't), but the quality of the pixels sure does.
You may have been inadvertently subverting his summer camp experience.
Why? I don't get this. As long as the plane is moving at a constant speed it should be no different from sitting in a stationary room right? Unless there's like turbulence or something I guess?
1) People don't tend to watch 720p content on large FOV displays.
For example, 720p on my phone is fine, because it takes up less FOV than a theater.
2) Content can be upscaled, picels cannot.
Downsampling compressed 4k video to 720p probably looks quite good as long as they don’t then compress the output.
I hadn't thought of that. As a fairly tall person, working on a laptop or tablet on a plane has become a literal pain in the neck. I don't know if it's that the seats are closer, the tray tables are lower, or maybe I'm just getting old. This seems like a much more pleasant experience.
Not sure if I'd be desperate enough to try it on a plane (the stereoscopy would probably make me sick), but as a viewing experience it's phenomenal. The OLED panel on the original Quest is a godsend for movie watching, and when streaming over DNLA I can get 3-4 hours of battery life.
It truly is a glorious viewing experience, and if you make the screen large enough you effectively get full 1080p detail.
Sometimes I've found resting the laptop in my lap/knees along the screen hinge (so it makes a 45 degree angle with my thigh) to be the most usable. This requires you to pull your shoulders/elbows back however so you usually can't do it if you have someone you don't know sitting next to you.
I have strongly debated bringing my Quest 2 onto a plane and using a wireless keyboard to program with, I think the ergonomics would work out much better when flying coach.
- Thanks to the headset's optics, you're staring at a point in space ~5ft in front of you instead of a couple feet tops which cuts down eye strain
- It's private, so you don't feel like people are watching over your shoulder
- On international or redeye flights, you're not keeping everybody up with the light spewing from your tablet/phone
On almost every international overnight flight I've been on people watch movies and TV on seat back monitors at all times. For people who need absolute darkness the airline usually provides an eye mask.
If I'm watching on a 7" screen on a seatback, I still have peripheral vision. I want to maintain that. I want to see on the area that isn't the screen, I just want something bigger than 7", and the ability to do things besides just watch movies/TV (like, my own content or games....).
Basically, this is clickbait.
It just seems to me like many people might struggle with VR on a plane given that planes and VR can each on their own cause people to vomit, and not only would you be using both at the same time, but they would actually impact each other because the plane has turbulence which would impact accelerometers but not cameras.
I have no idea how this would all work out in the end. Perhaps it wouldn't be as bad as one might think.
Yeah the important thing is to turn off the cameras. It'd be a vomit inducer otherwise.
* Sure, you don't get the full resolution. The apps typically put you in a virtual movie theatre and "waste" pixels on your environs. But people watch 720p content all the time! Would I want this to be my only media experience? No. Is it better than your tiny phone or cheap tablet on your tray table? Yes.
* The 6dof tracking is totally off because the cameras can't see the fact that you're moving and you just end up shifting wildly. You can turn it off and go back to accelerometer-based head tracking and it works fine (modulo landing and takeoff, and in those regimes you just need to reset the viewport every so often). I would recommend you turn off 6dof before you get on the plane though; it's wild trying to do it on the plane.