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Arthur T Knackerbracket has found the following story:

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).

-- submitted from IRC

Original Submission