However, your eyes have depth of field view too. Your eyes are actually cameras in that point regard. Look at the monitor, your hand or any object close to you. Focus on it. Notice how the background gets blurry? That’s a feature from your eyes and brain to bring stuff into focus.
But besides this fact, even if you would see everything in focus, its does not mean the developers of film scenes (movies or games) shouldn’t use DOF as a tool for an artistic expression. It can help bring things in focus in a busy background.
Yeah we see non blurred only in a ridiculously small portion we look at anyways, IIRC it’s in a 3° split angle from the centre (yes you read that correctly, a cone at 3 degrees…).
huh? Your eyes absolutely do have limited depth of field just like any camera, and need to focus at a particular distance. Anything as close as your nose will be out of focus, and if you’re reading something close, your distant vision will be blurry.
You usually don’t notice it because the focus immediately follows your active attention.
It looks wrong in games when the game wrongly assumes which item on screen you actually want to be looking at.
I think you misunderstood what they meant. Like you said, your eyes adjust to have anything you’re looking at in focus. This means games shouldn’t use DoF because it makes everything not in the center of the screen out of focus. Our eyes can look at anything on the screen, not just the center. Until the game can track our eyes, not the center point, DoF is doing the opposite of what our eyes do. We can only look at one point clearly, instead of seeing anything we look at clearly.
If the camera is meant to simulate vision then I’m just not seeing the issue. It would make sense that the center of the character’s vision is in focus.
Your eyes wander. They don’t just look directly ahead. Directly ahead is not the only thing you’re looking at. That’s just not how we work. We’re constantly scanning around looking at different objects. Sure, DoF accurately simulates looking at exactly where you’re facing, but that doesn’t accurately simulate the way we look at our environment.
Just to back up your edit, the tech has been around for decades. Only really reached consumers properly a couple decades ago, and has had no real adoption beyond the novelty. VR has brought it further into adoption, since you can render things at lower quality where the user isn’t looking. Further development of course depends on the adoption of VR which is slow at best and stagnant at worst.
I feel like this is sort of how foveated rendering works now in VR with eye tracking. Rendering only what’s directly in the center of your view at full resolution to reduce the rendering workload and boost performance. Since you’re not going to actually view all that a full resolution anyway in your peripheral vision.
It should be a lot harder than foveated rendering. For foveation you need to know the position of the eye, but for dof you need the shape of the lense inside the eye.
You could try estimating the focus based on what the eyes together point at, but the eyes don’t actually focus in perfect match with their stereo vision.
And then if you do manage to track it, you need to undo the eyes lense too, since it’s naturally trying to blur the screen away from being in focus.
Currently vr just ignores it and the eye just doesn’t focus like it naturally would, but if you wanna have say the ability to focus between two overlapping things with the other blurring out of the way, you need that lense input, so you need the eye to focus, so you need to let the lense squeeze while the screen stays in focus.
Tracking lenses seems so hard I wouldn’t be surprised if we get light field displays first. Which sidestep the whole problem and are really the right way to do it. Proper sharpness and blur on a passive screen even without tracking. For a good looking blur you probably only need a handful angular pixels, since you know the exact location the eye is at.
Would need (flat surface) holography style screens to really trick the eyes and fully simulate long range depth rather than simulating it. A proper dynamic holographic screen wouldn’t even need fancy lenses (unless you need to resize perhaps). Most current light field-ish displays are just doing mirror/prism arrays over pixels, which looks neat at a distance, but don’t have the resolution to trick the eye (see: the external eye screen on the Vision Pro).
Yeah, VR doesn’t need to fake it. Foveated rendering does fake it to an extent, but it’s purely at a detriment to image quality, but it’s out-of-focus anyway, so that doesn’t really matter, but the performance increase does.
Their point was wherever we look it is in focus, because our eyes adjust, so the game should not blur anything, because if I want to look at trees down the road they shouldn’t default to blurry because I’m not at the trees.
Look, I do hear you, but when there is a director involved and they want to shape the narrative in a particular direction, then that’s one of the tools they have available. It’s just what it is.
> Player Character walks into a room
> Control immediately taken away from player
> Camera slowly pans and zooms to the next door in the room, completely covered in padlocks and chains
> Pauses for an annoyingly long duration
> Camera slowly pans left to a climbable wall marked with yellow paint
> Pause again
> Camera pans back to POV
> Character says to sidekick “Hmmmm, that’ll be tough to get through. We should look for another way around”
I hate DOF, too. Your eyes aren’t a camera, any place you look should be in focus!
My eyes will do the blurring on their own, thank you very much. Same goes for motion blur.
Still useful for foveated rendering, but that tracking where your eyes are actually looking
Yeah we see non blurred only in a ridiculously small portion we look at anyways, IIRC it’s in a 3° split angle from the centre (yes you read that correctly, a cone at 3 degrees…).
Realism first! Foveated rendering for all games, not just VR! I only want the center of the display anyway!
BRB putting my monitor on a gimbal with eye tracking
huh? Your eyes absolutely do have limited depth of field just like any camera, and need to focus at a particular distance. Anything as close as your nose will be out of focus, and if you’re reading something close, your distant vision will be blurry.
You usually don’t notice it because the focus immediately follows your active attention.
It looks wrong in games when the game wrongly assumes which item on screen you actually want to be looking at.
I think you misunderstood what they meant. Like you said, your eyes adjust to have anything you’re looking at in focus. This means games shouldn’t use DoF because it makes everything not in the center of the screen out of focus. Our eyes can look at anything on the screen, not just the center. Until the game can track our eyes, not the center point, DoF is doing the opposite of what our eyes do. We can only look at one point clearly, instead of seeing anything we look at clearly.
If the camera is meant to simulate vision then I’m just not seeing the issue. It would make sense that the center of the character’s vision is in focus.
Your eyes wander. They don’t just look directly ahead. Directly ahead is not the only thing you’re looking at. That’s just not how we work. We’re constantly scanning around looking at different objects. Sure, DoF accurately simulates looking at exactly where you’re facing, but that doesn’t accurately simulate the way we look at our environment.
I wonder if there’s a tech demo somewhere on the Internet of DoF using eye tracking
edit: huh yeah, here’s a video 18 years old. kinda neat https://youtu.be/HdW1v9TPNYw
Just to back up your edit, the tech has been around for decades. Only really reached consumers properly a couple decades ago, and has had no real adoption beyond the novelty. VR has brought it further into adoption, since you can render things at lower quality where the user isn’t looking. Further development of course depends on the adoption of VR which is slow at best and stagnant at worst.
I feel like this is sort of how foveated rendering works now in VR with eye tracking. Rendering only what’s directly in the center of your view at full resolution to reduce the rendering workload and boost performance. Since you’re not going to actually view all that a full resolution anyway in your peripheral vision.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Foveated_rendering
It should be a lot harder than foveated rendering. For foveation you need to know the position of the eye, but for dof you need the shape of the lense inside the eye.
You could try estimating the focus based on what the eyes together point at, but the eyes don’t actually focus in perfect match with their stereo vision.
And then if you do manage to track it, you need to undo the eyes lense too, since it’s naturally trying to blur the screen away from being in focus.
Currently vr just ignores it and the eye just doesn’t focus like it naturally would, but if you wanna have say the ability to focus between two overlapping things with the other blurring out of the way, you need that lense input, so you need the eye to focus, so you need to let the lense squeeze while the screen stays in focus.
Tracking lenses seems so hard I wouldn’t be surprised if we get light field displays first. Which sidestep the whole problem and are really the right way to do it. Proper sharpness and blur on a passive screen even without tracking. For a good looking blur you probably only need a handful angular pixels, since you know the exact location the eye is at.
Would need (flat surface) holography style screens to really trick the eyes and fully simulate long range depth rather than simulating it. A proper dynamic holographic screen wouldn’t even need fancy lenses (unless you need to resize perhaps). Most current light field-ish displays are just doing mirror/prism arrays over pixels, which looks neat at a distance, but don’t have the resolution to trick the eye (see: the external eye screen on the Vision Pro).
Yeah, VR doesn’t need to fake it. Foveated rendering does fake it to an extent, but it’s purely at a detriment to image quality, but it’s out-of-focus anyway, so that doesn’t really matter, but the performance increase does.
Their point was wherever we look it is in focus, because our eyes adjust, so the game should not blur anything, because if I want to look at trees down the road they shouldn’t default to blurry because I’m not at the trees.
Even in games, I find myself pointing the gun down when I’m not using it.
This is part of art direction and the director is trying to focus the viewer’s attention on a particular area by utilizing it.
I understand where you’re coming from but utilized well, it is a powerful tool.
It’s a movie technique. Makes sense for cutscenes, not for gameplay.
Look, I do hear you, but when there is a director involved and they want to shape the narrative in a particular direction, then that’s one of the tools they have available. It’s just what it is.
> Player Character walks into a room
> Control immediately taken away from player
> Camera slowly pans and zooms to the next door in the room, completely covered in padlocks and chains
> Pauses for an annoyingly long duration
> Camera slowly pans left to a climbable wall marked with yellow paint
> Pause again
> Camera pans back to POV
> Character says to sidekick “Hmmmm, that’ll be tough to get through. We should look for another way around”
Modern gaming narrative direction 👌
Regardless of the reason, on PCs you fortunately usually have the option to turn that crap off.