Comment by victoriasun
7 years ago
> There is a point where that will happen for video: when you can fill the entire field of view of the human eye with video the same resolution as your fovea at ~100FPS, that's it. There is no more room for improvement.
There's a lot of room for improvement in VR though. VR is computationally expensive because you have to calculate 2 sets of high resolution imagery. Not to mention that immersiveness in VR comes at a resolution cost. We're nowhere near 100FPS, high resolution 4k VR imagery.
I mostly agree with you. I wrote a paper during my time at Bose arguing against the rise of 4k which in retrospect I think has only been halfway true so far -- we've known for many years that consumers would not experience a significant improvement upgrading their televisions, but the 4k market is burgeoning anyways. We also didn't anticipate back then how important 4k would be to gaming and VR.
Not to mention that the lack of penetration of higher quality music in the market is mostly a cost problem rather than a storage problem. The average consumer cannot afford the sound setup necessary to truly utilize these higher quality codecs, whereas a 4k television panel can be had for under 500 now a days (!!!!). Netflix offers 4k streaming at 10/month, whereas Tidal's lossless streaming costs 20/month. It is shockingly inexpensive to be into high quality images.
4K works for 40 degree field of view (That's pushing it, but for immersive movies that's what THX recommends). 4K works because of the increased HDR and framerate.
But most of it is 4K works because of the hype. Why buy last year's model?
4K is a resolution for 40 degrees wide and 23 degrees high. That's about 1/45th of a sphere, or about 2% of the total you'd need for a fully immersive 360 degree picture.
From what I've seen, 120fps is a clear improvement over 60fps, and that's just on a normal flat screen.
So even with a fixed focus single image you're looking at needing 400 megapixels. At 30 bits per pixel that's 12GBit per frame, or 1.5TBit/second.
You've then got technology that records depth, and allows people to chose their own depth of field. And why stop at visible resolution - we don't with pictures, because we can zoom in. Imagine a choice of say 100 360 degree cameras around a football stadium that allows you to zoom to a desired level, you could be up Petabit emerging from the stadium.
> whereas a 4k television panel can be had for under 500 now a days
i would be much more worried about color accuracy than resolution with a $500 tv. could be i'm wrong due to economies of scale from large amount of consumers demanding "the 4K", but my guess is that a $500 1080p tv could look significantly better than 4K at the same price.