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Why virtual reality got so high requirements?
VR looks like just any other 3d game, but with monitor on head with some movement sensors.
I don't know why games using VR has to be generated other way than current 3d games (I guess it is just rendering whole area instead of what POV is looking at).
Why VR can't just be monitor with movement sensors sending to the normal game and instead of mouse, moving of head would move the camera?

Because interacting with reality is hard.

We take for granted how easily our brains can do it.

But to date, no computer can do it even half as well as we do, and they need a ton of energy and computing power to do so in a timeframe even remotely close to our perception of realtime.

Its mainly because to trick your mind you need very high frame rates (90+) and very low latency.

Another aspect to consider is that each of your eyes gets a different view of the world, so parts of the scene drawing code need to run twice per frame compared to non-VR.

There are several factors, some of which got already mentioned.

Oculus Rift used to have a total resolution of 1280×800. That sounds good enough for a PC screen, but with VR there is a catch. You effectively have two screens, one for each eye, which evenly divide the horizontal pixels. 1280/2 = 640, thus 1280x800 total resolution comes out at 640x800 for each eye, which is prehistoric. In practice, when you slap such a lowres screen right against your eye, you see the gaps between pixels quite significantly, and it looks like seeing the world through a thick grid. This is why currently Rift has a resolution of 1080x1200 per eye, or 2160x1200 in total. Quite hefty, but still manageable, right? I mean, some people do have 4K screens. BUT

Another thing to consider is framerate. You can't play VR at 30FPS. You can't play even at the mythical 60FPS, believe it or not. You need a stable 90FPS in VR. Why? Motion sickness. VR is all about immersion. If you can't fully immerse yourself in the world, you have issues. The human brain is so sensitive it can't bear VR for the absolute tiniest of details. This involves even moving around with WASD keys, which is why HTC Vive went down the room-scale experience route. It also involves low framerates, they get you sick real fast, and it's so bad you need those 90 frames every second to survive. Now consider running contemporary games at 2180x1200 and stable 90FPS, that's quite the tall order for hardware isn't it?

Of course there are other things to consider, like the fact that everything gets rendered twice, that there's a ton of input to process from the gyros etc. etc. but resolution and framerate requirements are the absolute worst offenders.

We know the world through our senses and perception systems. In school we all learned that we have five senses: taste, touch, smell, sight and hearing.

SergioMak wrote:We know the world through our senses and perception systems. In school we all learned that we have five senses: taste, touch, smell, sight and hearing.

Which is barely even considered a minimum.

One of the senses is equilibrium, and that's the one that actually gives you the infamous "Motion sickness"
It's actually a synchronisation of 4 other senses, Sight, hearing, Balance and Motion. And if the 3 do not sync up, equilibrium fails.
Yes, Balance and Motion are both senses. The full list is in excess of 20.
It's actually silly what can give you motion sickness, one of the reasons why I stopped playing warframe for example is because when they changed all the GUI around to make it more "Console friendly", they did this "Change the angle of the screen to make it look like you're looking at what the mouse pointer is pointing at" thing. and for some reason that really messed with my head and gave me motion sickness. I was forced to quit the game as a result.


Something tells me that although my computer is "VR Ready" that it will fail at meeting these requirements. Currently I have a 1920x1200 screen resolution (Only a scratch lower than the 2160x1200 of the rift), and even in some of the more simple games, I struggle to get 30fps.
It's a Geforce 970.

SergioMak wrote:We know the world through our senses and perception systems. In school we all learned that we have five senses: taste, touch, smell, sight and hearing.

You still use that Aristotle's 5-sense list He was a good philosopher, but a crappy scientist if I may say.
There has been some advance in science these last 2300 years or so

I don't dare try to use VR on my PC anyways. My computer currently has a power supply that is known to catch fire when it's really pushed to it's limits. I know I should try to get it replaced by something more reliable, but I just don't have the money to do it right now.
For the time being, i'll just stick to TF2 for right now. I do want to try VR in the future, though.

There is another aspect, regarding the resolution:

HD resolution on a conventional screen provides roughly the quality you need for a normal experience when working on your PC - this screen covers something like 30-60 degree of your eyesight, depending on screensize and your viewing distance.

When it comes to VR, you need at least 90 degree eyesight, preferably even more ... perfectly up to 180 degrees for full emersion. Due to this bigger angle, even a VR-Headset providing 1200x1200 per eye at 90 degrees only gives like 500x300 pix resolution for your eye when looking at a virtual monitor standing there.

For a conparable HD-experience in like 120+ degree panorama, you need rather like 6000x6000 pix per eye ... at 120 Hz - thats like 8 Gigapixels calculated per second, compared to 0,12 Gigapixel per second for an actual standard screen at 60 Hz.

Of course, there are possibilities to reduce this requirement - for example by focusing max. quality to the center of view, while reducing the quality towards the edges.

But once we reach this point of computing power, we'll have a REAL VR-experience, thats getting close to real life. My guess is, that we'll be seeing this level within the next 15 years ... so VR is the area where 8K can really shine.