I'm not criticising your project at all -- just saying that my experience with current VR display tech is such that I can't imagine reading text for more than 30 seconds. The aliasing and distortion would make my eyes bleed pretty quickly.

The time will come for textual VR environments though! I can't wait to have "newspaper resolution" for textures (hold up a virtual newspaper in a VR world and you can actually read the text like it were a printed page). But I suspect it's not going to happen before the mid-2020s at least.

It's nowhere near as bad as you've described. Even on the 960x1080 DK2, the readability of text has more to do with texture quality (both total resolution and good filtering for mipmaps). On a 2d display, the pixels are static on the display and text is mapped essentially 1-to-1 (or a fixed n-to-m when using subpixel antialiasing). But on an HMD, antialiasing is basically 'free', and the constant, minuscule bob of the head creates a dynamic, temporal aliasing that improves the readability of the text. We've known about the effect since the 80s or 90s, when psychologists figured out the dynamic environment of real flight improved the apparent eyesight of pilots over static images.

There are a lot of people who are doing text wrong in VR. You don't render at 10pt and expect it to look right. You have to pay attention and not just take the default settings.

I've spent much time reading and writing text in VR and it hasn't been a problem. If building a real, live code editing environment were my goal, I could have it done in a week. But I have different goals.

That's very interesting. My experience may be colored by the Oculus Mobile experience, which has a higher resolution than the desktop DK2 but a much weaker GPU and much less RAM to play with. (That's because the VR is rendered by the phone.)

Texture filtering on the Galaxy Note 4's embedded GPU is probably not a priority. On a 2560*1440 phone screen, who can even see those artifacts? So it could be that the hardware and drivers are taking quite a few shortcuts there, and those come to haunt on the Oculus.

It could just be the programmers who made whatever you've tried don't know very much about texturing. Most of the AAA games I've tried in VR have not had text that was even remotely readable, and it was all because it was rendered too small.

The Gear VR has a fairly decent GPU. The move to mobile was more about discarding legacy fixed-function pipeline techniques and more directly optimizing for shaders. The main factor limiting texture-fill is GPU RAM. But most devices have more than enough RAM to be able to render text well.

VR is a realism multiplier. Traditional 3D graphics techniques are realism fakers. You shouldn't apply many traditional graphics techniques, because they have perspective-dependent artifacts that are subtle to impossible to notice in mono still images but glaring in stereo motion. So I think it's folly to apply too much effort on things like displacement shaders or stereo textures. These sort of things both A) cost a lot of time, and B) look terrible in an unrestricted stereo view. There's even new research to suggest one's general hormonal balance can have a huge impact in whether or not these miscues are going to cause simulator sickness in a user. You could literally be alienating half of your potential users along gender lines.

In the face of that, I think it makes more sense to stick to simpler techniques that respect the Hippocratic Oath: first, do no harm. We've been able to write some 3D games that run at 150fps for over a decade now. But there is no 150hz display to pair it with. V-sync is probably the most important issue, followed closely by running at native resolution (so for a given GPU, a lower resolution screen might actually be better, because it will be easier to hit the full refresh rate at the native resolution) and clean, consistent antialiasing. It wouldn't be a problem if both eyes were rendered identically, but having the dual eyes highlights any visual artifacts that appear. Match those three issues and the realism of the content doesn't matter, it could be flat-color, Phong-shaded cubes and you'll have a great VR experience. Miss any of them and even high-end games like Elite: Dangerous that are gorgeous on 2D will look like complete garbage.

VR has completely inverted the priorities of graphics programmers. Because of this, I think the primary VR innovation is going to come from indie developers, because most established companies can't switch their focus away from their 2D-display oriented consumer base. The Call of Duty series has sold over 175 million units. Assume nearly $40 a pop, that makes over $7 billion. You're not going to see VR getting anywhere near that for a few years still, and companies like Activision and EA aren't going to chase after such small potatoes in anyway other than just PR.

Please elaborate! I am curious what your experience and setup is. I have zero interest in consuming media or games through VR but I am really wondering how it can be productive. Do you get more work done compared to regular monitors, or is it the same work while feeling 199% cooler?

Check the url in his profile.