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Focal surface displays mimic the way our eyes naturally focus at objects of varying depths. Rather than trying to add more and more focus areas to get the same degree of depth, this new approach changes the way light enters the display using spatial light modulators (SLMs) to bend the headset's focus around 3D objects—increasing depth and maximizing the amount of space represented simultaneously.
All of this adds up to improved image sharpness and a more natural viewing experience in VR.
"Quite frankly, one of the reasons this project ran as long as it did is that we did a bunch of things wrong the first time around," jokes Research Scientist Fix. "Manipulating focus isn't quite the same as modulating intensity or other more usual tasks in computational displays, and it took us a while to get to the correct mathematical formulation that finally brought everything together. Our overall motivation was to do things the 'right' way—solid engineering combined with the math and algorithms to back it up. We weren't going to be happy with something that only worked on paper or a hacked together prototype that didn't have any rigorous explanation of why it worked."
The paper (PDF).
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(Score: 2) by jmorris on Saturday May 20 2017, @06:40PM
Doesn't need to know where you are looking, only at what depth. They could illuminate the retina with a dim pattern in IR and them image it, the auto focus setting needed to see it giving them the information they need. For that matter the retina itself is probably enough for a focus target. Remember that lenses work both directions, if the one in your eye is changing focus to look at different things it would require a sensor looking into the eye to follow that. And the current focal surface display is only trying for three levels, close, near, far so if you can detect better than that you can emulate far more in software than you can layer on extra planes in hardware because of the quickly escalating refresh rate problem.
In the far future of course lightfields and holograms will rule the day. They are obviously superior in every way other than our current ability to implement them cheap, light and high resolution. Little details or decades long tease is hard to say. Remember how we were going to have terrabyte capacity holographic optical media? Several attempts have almost shipped something before going bankrupt..... still impractical twenty years on though. The promo materials are so old storing a terrabyte sounded really awesome!