Because the corrections are needed no matter how good your lenses are - it's a remapping of pixels so those pixels appear in the correct place in your plane of vision, and doesn't have anything to do with compensating for low quality lens

Yes, I get that, now. The corners of a flat display is further away than the center and the pixels there subtend a smaller arc on the eye than those at the center would. Duh!

I'd imagine a learning session where certain scenes (e.g. grids) are displayed and the system would apply software corrections under my control until it looked good to me.

Not possible, I'm afraid. Whatever the screen puts out is going to get blurred by your astigmatism and short-sightedness, and only a physical lens can pre-correct it for your eyes.

Duh. There is no "pre-blurring" or correction that would result in the right image appearing on my eye. My eye's focus is off and no matter what comes in, it will still land on the wrong place to make a clear image. My bad. Thanks for the explanation!

It's been decades since my last physics course that dealt at all with optics, so a course that dealt specifically with optics is not a bad idea. We only touched upon ideal lenses, reflection, and refraction. Never touched on aberrations or distortions.

Liquid lenses would be nice. Bifocals are a pain. Full-lens near and far vision would be wonderful!

Thank-you for your thoughtful reply! It's been decades since my last physics class that dealt at all with optics, and we never got into the various distortions and aberrations. It was also in light of a theoretically perfect lens (or two) and a bit with reflection and refraction. Your explanation of the wavefront delays made perfect sense - I think I see it now (pun intended!).

From TFA (emphasis added):

Consumer, wide-angle HMDs use relatively cheap lenses to bring the screen into focus for the human eyes and enable the wide field of view. The drawback is that there are spatial distortions and chromatic aberrations. Luckily, those can be compensated for in software and this e.g. in the Oculus SDK done as a post-processing pixel shader. The default implementations are warping the image in a barrel-distorted way and are using bilinear texture access to do so. The result is that the processed image is getting blurred.

My first thought was "Why not use better quality lenses?" Sure, they'd be more expensive, but there is an expense involved in the software having to correct Every Single Frame. Why not fix it once, at the source, and obviate the need for continuous real-time updates?

But my next thought was more positive. I wear glasses (near-sighted and have astigmatism, too). It would be *so* nice if there were a way to correct for that in software so I could wear VR goggles without my glasses. I'd imagine a learning session where certain scenes (e.g. grids) are displayed and the system would apply software corrections under my control until it looked good to me. That could be saved as a profile and then be loaded whenever I used their VR display.

The next step, of course, would be to find a way to leverage this "training" into my next eye exam!

voice control has inherent lag.

That's a good point and I agree there is lag. There is, say, intrinsic lag, in the need to receive enough sound to reliably distinguish one "command" from another. Then there is the lag required by the computer to make that discernment.

The summary asked "what's next?" and I would think current processing limitations, the discernment part, could be mitigated by advancements in processing power and algorithms. We may not be there, yet, but I could foresee a time when we would.

As for the intrinsic lag (and to some extent the processing lag) one could "lead" one's shots. Nothing says I have to wait until the target is already under the cross hairs before I *start* saying my command. Much like a quarterback leads his receiver, only sonically.

NOTE: I am NOT suggesting this would replace existing controls, but rather could act as a *supplement* to those already provided.

Besides, every input has a delay between the time I conceive of what I want to do and the time where I've commanded the computer to do it. Trackballs, joysticks, mice, and keyboards all have some delay. I'm thinking that there are at least *some* cases where one can use an audio input to achieve one's goal faster than using only the currently available manual controls.

btw if you wanted you could without too much trouble configure your pc to press shoot button on saying pew pew. but you'd get your avatars head shot off.

With *current* hardware, yes. Again, I was thinking of the future where processing overhead delay could be lessened to the point where this would be practicable, and with "leading" the shot, vocally.

Further, this need not be limited to only firing a weapon. That was just a sample use case for the sake of discussion. See my other example of saying "one" or "seven" while playing Sudoku on my computer instead of having to find and select it from a menu. I'm sure there are others and I'd love to see the /. community comes up with as possibilities and applications.

Obviously, there are cases where this would not help. Fine, don't use it. But I would think there ARE cases where this could augment/enhance existing controls. Maybe not right now, but in the foreseeable future, yes. Especially when both hands are busy trying to do other things, already.

In a word: Voice.

1.) Playing sudoku on my pc, it would be nice (and faster) if I could just SAY "one" or "seven", instead of trying to select it from a menu or scroll my trackwheel until that number is selected.

2.) One step further, though, instead of just "words" use custom sounds. Make the initial sound of saying the letter "T". Each time that sound is "heard" fire the (currently selected) gun.

3) I'm sure that even a small vocabulary of sounds could provide rapid access to select and use different armaments. "Boom", "Bam", "Pow", "Pop", "Pip" could, for example, select andor fire decreasingly destructive arms. Use your imagination.

Cues campy 70's Batman and Robin TV fight scenes and munches popcorn.. ;^)

Just how in the world do they expect us to automate our tests, now? Will we have to program little hand-waving robots to make gestures? And we'll, of course, need different-sized hands and fingers, too.

Just imagine a room full of computers with hand waving robots whirring around running unit, functional, and system tests of a new app.

Then imagine filing a bug report with explicit steps to reproduce.

Oh, this will be fun.

Physicists - please cover your ears, I'm trying to simplify.

When particle move near the speed of light their mass increases. At the speed of light it becomes infinite. Imagine a very light particle, moving very fast. By making it move near C I can get any mass I want. So now imagine i make the original particle lighter, an keep moving it faster in such a way that its moving mass stays the same. In the limit a particle with zero mass moving at the speed of light can have some moving mass. That is how a photon works.

Gravity will bend light, but the effect is very weak because light is moving very quickly. Gravity around a black hole is so strong that it will stop even light.

Real relativity and general relativity changes this a little, but the basic idea is the same. Photons are very light -> massless. They move very fast -> speed of light, so they have mass from their motion. Gravity doesn't bend light much - but black holes have very strong gravity so they do bend light.

*This* is what keeps me coming back to /.!

When I was in college (many moons ago), we covered Newtonian physics, but they only mentioned general/special relativity in passing, and poorly at that. I was exposed to the concept of black holes, newtron stars, and white dwarfs, in my astronomy courses, but again in a superficial, hand-wavy manner. Thank you very much for your clear and lucid explanation!

So, IIRC, gravity is a relatively weak force, compared to, say, electrostatic forces. And yet, near a black hole, gravity is so intense that even light cannot escape. Such a maelstrom of insanely massive currents and magnetic fields must be swirling around black holes, pulsars, etc.! That we can ponder about, and even quantify, such things... simply amazing!!

Aaaaah! rest mass == massless, but because of their energy, and e=mc^2, there is, effectively, a mass, which the black hole can act upon... got it! Thanks!

I've also heard that black holes are so massive that the force of gravity does not let anything escape including light.

So, if photons have no mass, how do black holes keep the photons from escaping?