Edit: The viewing angle is 57 degrees. In comparison most VR headset have a viewing angle of 90-110 degrees.
FOV shouldn’t be ignored, but having a large FOV also isn’t necessarily desirable on a HMD. It’s important for VR, because a major point of that is filling one’s peripheral vision, creating a sense of immersion.
But if you wanted, say, an HMD as a monitor replacement — something that I’d be interested in — it doesn’t buy all that much, because the stuff that you can see with high detail is only in a small cone in front of you. For a given pixel resolution, I’d rather have a smaller FOV on an HMD for that, because you can take advantage of fairly high angular resolutions within that narrow cone. The real bottleneck on an HMD as a monitor replacement is the limited angular resolution you get — you can’t have something that gets as sharp and crisp as existing conventional monitors.
True, especially with the current state of display technology and 1080p screens in those glasses its a pretty valid compromise.
I mostly just take issue with those dominant marketing claims of 170" screens. Its just bullshit.
Eg Valve did the same thing in the trailer for the frame. Just not directly and only with a short sneaky visual cgi representation of how a virtual screen is projected in front of the consumer. Which is from my experience way to big. I own a standalone headset with a measured 104 degrees of fov on my face. But the useable screensize in headset pretty much aligns with my 48" monitor 3-4 feet in front of me. With 57 degrees its probably more like a 32" monitor which sounds way less impressive than a 170" screen which happens to be farther away. Its just in itself a misleading metric which is intentionally used in a misleading way.
FOV shouldn’t be ignored, but having a large FOV also isn’t necessarily desirable on a HMD. It’s important for VR, because a major point of that is filling one’s peripheral vision, creating a sense of immersion.
But if you wanted, say, an HMD as a monitor replacement — something that I’d be interested in — it doesn’t buy all that much, because the stuff that you can see with high detail is only in a small cone in front of you. For a given pixel resolution, I’d rather have a smaller FOV on an HMD for that, because you can take advantage of fairly high angular resolutions within that narrow cone. The real bottleneck on an HMD as a monitor replacement is the limited angular resolution you get — you can’t have something that gets as sharp and crisp as existing conventional monitors.
True, especially with the current state of display technology and 1080p screens in those glasses its a pretty valid compromise.
I mostly just take issue with those dominant marketing claims of 170" screens. Its just bullshit.
Eg Valve did the same thing in the trailer for the frame. Just not directly and only with a short sneaky visual cgi representation of how a virtual screen is projected in front of the consumer. Which is from my experience way to big. I own a standalone headset with a measured 104 degrees of fov on my face. But the useable screensize in headset pretty much aligns with my 48" monitor 3-4 feet in front of me. With 57 degrees its probably more like a 32" monitor which sounds way less impressive than a 170" screen which happens to be farther away. Its just in itself a misleading metric which is intentionally used in a misleading way.