How do vr lenses work

Although this solution may reduce the number of ridges where light can scatter, having bigger sections of thin lenses can significantly reduce the sharpness of the VR image. Considering how much of the cost of these VR headsets go into high-resolution displays, ruining the image quality because of the lenses seems like a backward step. More recently, Facebook filed a patent for a hybrid Fresnel lens, presumably for their Oculus headsets. The hybrid design has a standard, non-Fresnel lens near the center to reduce the god rays effect.

The Fresnel lenses are then used along the periphery where the god rays effect will not be as egregious. This design may not be as small and light as a full Fresnel lens, but it may address one of the biggest optical artifacts that have persisted through this generation of VR headsets.

However, VR lenses have been around since the time that VR headsets merely consisted of a cardboard frame and a pair of straps. They basically act as the interface between our eyes and the high-resolution display that sits a mere few inches away.

Simple as they may seem, lenses have become a focal point of the innovation efforts of VR technology companies. Optical aberrations still continue to become a problem even in the current generation of VR headsets. Your email address will not be published. Sign me up for the newsletter! Posted on October 20, We may earn money from your clicks, at no extra cost for you.

We are also affiliates of numerous other programs. Outbound clicks may earn the site money. But just as important are the lenses in front of that screen. So just why are the lenses such an important component of VR headsets, and how do they affect the quality of the VR experience? Lenses have been around for millennia, and the basic principles behind them are simple to observe. The glass or water, or given translucent material bends the light coming through it. Build a shape out of the given material to bend the light in the way you want, and you have a lens.

The first property is known as the refractive index, which tells you how much a given material can bend the light that enters it. This effect happens because light slows down as it enters the material, and the more it slows down, the more it bends. Common examples include air, which is only slightly refractive, to in increasing refractive index water, plastic, and glass. A final factor is the presence of unwanted artifacts, or aberrations, in a lens. A prism, as you might have intuited from above, is just another type of lens.

And just like a prism, a lens will separate colors from each other as the light bends. This is known as chromatic aberration. Search Articles. Vibration Reduction. Glossary Off On. Practical Uses of VR What does this mean in practical terms? More Like This More articles like this.

Article Collections. Articles like this, right in your inbox. First Name required. Last Name required. They correct the incoming light and make it usable for you again. Check out the video below for more details and to understand the limits of our current Fresnel lens technology. If your eyes focus on something far away, they focus on infinity.

That means the rays of light are parallel and the lenses of your eyes are relaxed. If an object like this little fly moves closer to your eyes and you want to keep it in focus your lens bends and breaks the light differently. To keep the fly in focus all the light from a single point on the insect needs to be focused on a single point in the back of your eyes.

This is why VR HMDs need special lenses, so the angle of the light from the lenses is corrected so that it can be used by our eyes again.