Virtual Reality Out of Your Monitor: Egocentric Projection

posted in Simmie's Journal
Published April 25, 2024
Advertisement

Hi everybody!

I post very rarely to this blog, but I am still alive! I just released a video on the topic of egocentric projection. It's not a topic tightly related to game development, however, I think it is a really neat and rarely talked about technique in computer graphics. Egocentric projection lets you make objects appear to be behind or in front of the actual display by tracking the viewer. How it works exactly and what it looks like, you can see in my video.

Let me know what you think about it!

2 likes 4 comments

Comments

JoeJ

Ha, awesome :D

I would love to see an eye tracker on every display.
We would get a second mouse for input, e.g. to decouple aiming from looking / movement directions.
We could do foveated rendering to lower power and HW costs.
But i did not think of matching fov to the real world player as well.

April 25, 2024 09:10 PM
Simmie

@JoeJ Just noticed that I failed to reply and commented instead, so you can find my reply down below :D

April 25, 2024 09:27 PM
Simmie

Thank you very much! That's actually the direction I want to go, basically doing egocentric projection using eye tracking. Then you can control the application as usual using mouse/keyboard but you can also do small view adjustments by physically moving your head. Let's see how that goes :D

April 25, 2024 09:14 PM
JoeJ

There is ofc. one problem with matching fov.
If you have a small display or sit some distance away from it, your in game fov angle becomes too small to play 3D games.

So i wonder: Have you tried to increase the angle to see larger scenes? How does it feel?

I guess it may just work. But i also did some VR on flat screen experiment. I have rendered two small images side by side for stereo projection. Really small, just 4cm wide, so i could pinch my eyes to overlap the images like in a Magic Eye book.
It worked. It gave me true depth perception.
But it also caused eye strain and headache, and i could only enjoy the experience for 5 minutes at most.

April 26, 2024 05:49 AM
Simmie

@JoeJ Yeah, for 3D games the fov is probably too small, except maybe if you are sitting really close in front of a large TV. So, when your game is not specifically tailored towards this feature, it is probably a bad experience. I could imagine that if you have a simple game, you could move everything “in front of” the monitor, so you do not use the monitor as a “window” to a virtual world, but let the world exist outside of the monitor. As said this would only work for extremely simple games, maybe a 3D pong not games with complex worlds.

I experimented only a little bit with an artificially altered fov, it still kind of worked, but everything looked bigger/smaller than its actual size, so one might get the same effect by just scaling everything down, but I did not compare it directly.

Sounds like a super fun experiment you did, very cool that it worked, but I can imagine the eye strain :D I completely ignored the stereopsis effect for now, so the shown effect actually works better for a camera as it has only one “eye”. You can always solve this problem with shutter glasses and rendering alternating frames but I would love a solution that does not require you to wear any devices, even if it is a little less effective then.

April 26, 2024 09:04 AM
You must log in to join the conversation.
Don't have a GameDev.net account? Sign up!
Profile
Author
Advertisement
Advertisement