Whilst impatiently waiting for the optical gear to arrive from AliExpress, I did a bit of looking around on the internet for things related to Mixed Reality. It's not strictly TyMist related, but with all the different systems I'd need to design and test, I don't really want to find out I could've just taken it easy for a month or two and a company to come out with the next generation in MR technology. I'd still accept it, since I'd rather not invent everything here -- it sounds exciting until you have to spend hours grinding in some software because some things you think should've been a 30 second action is actually 600.

Pixel Counts

For starters, I wanted to see how many pixels I'd actually need to fill the entire area of vision reachable by the centre of my eye. It seems that a 45 degree cone was a good rough estimate. The pancake lenses for the 2560 OLED is also 90 degrees, so it sounds like a sensible number. 

The Nvidia ppd calculator says that an 8192x8192px at 90ppd center would give me an FOV of 91 degrees, and the reason why I chose that number is because, if the image merging idea of TyMist actually works, it could be possible to combine 4 4096px displays. I also looked into 8640x7680, which is 2 portrait 8K HD displays side to side. That would give a vertical FOV of 85 and horizontal of 96. The edge PPD is 118, so there should be enough to get a decent amount of peripheral vision of the eye covered too. But still... 16K. That's what the equivalent of 4 8K displays is, counting the pixels. Obviously, foveated rendering needs to be a thing that exists in the future.

With the screen panels of today, 5760px square is likely the best doable using the quad 2880 MiniLED panels. This theoretical headset would have a peak brightness of 760 nits, but won't be cheap since each panel was £150 each on Alibaba. 

I found though-the-lens videos of the Pimax Crystal, which uses 2 of these panels:

Since I don't have a VR headset, it's nice to see what it looks like. Considering the difference to the Pimax 8K, all I can think of is "Wow. People can play with all this blur? Wow, the human mind is impressive." 

I also found this image:

The ppd calc says that 5760 equates to 60ppd, which seems to match up with doubling and averaging the Crystal's PPD numbers.

Next, I'd like to say that I'm very excited for Porotech's new... tech, DPT.

Basically, say goodbye to individual red, green and blue subpixels. I've always wondered what would happen if someone had a 4th retina cone evenly spaced between green and blue, and how the world around them would look new and even more vibrant, but all screens would have a bright but unnatural colour (imagine if the rest of the world only saw red and blue. White to them would be magenta to you with your RGB cones). Well Me In That Imaginary World doesn't have to worry any longer. This single pixel would be able to ouput near-UV blues, real cyans, authentic yellows and White(tm). It might even be usable for 3D printing since there has been research into resins that react differently based on exposure to different wavelengths of light. Another benefit is that this tech could double the resolution of a screen since now a subpixel can be an actual pixel; the 4K displays of today can become the 8K displays of tomorrow, making a 4K Nreal Air a reality.

Future Headsets on the Community Wishlist

Whilst scanning, I noticed that PSVR and Apple's forever-rumoured headset usually come up. 

For Playstation conversations, some are hoping that someone out there cooks up a port for PCVR. 

For Apple, it seems that the conversations are more along the lines of what the VR landscape will be like after they announce and start selling their product. It seems like they've got high expectations of Apple to unveil something revolutionary. Even I got on that Dynamic Island hype train, so I can see where those expectations are coming from. Additionally, it's expected that AR is where the real mass-adoption is going to be.

There's also the Pimax 12K, which people are excited for because "it puts it all in one box, and nobody else is doing that".

Concept Looks

This was a design idea I've pocketted, along with these headphones:

I can't think of any design solutions at the moment, but I'd like to keep the concepts in mind.