What happens when each eye gets different information? It turns out, your brain is pretty good at making sense of everything if you design with some restraint. Our prototype here involved pointing a scanner at creatures wandering about, to find the one which had the red item. However, the scanned objects (red and blue below) were only shown in one of the two headset cameras, so only one eye would get that information.
We found that, even if an image is displayed only in one eye, the information from each separate eye gets superimposed on top of each other. The result is a surprisingly natural image that is less disorienting than one might expect. To be sure, this process of receiving different information in each eye still takes some getting used to, so its implementation should be used judiciously. However, it is definitely a unique and exciting feature that can only be done in VR.
There were even more directions in which this idea could be taken, but unfortunately, time constraints kept us from exploring this concept as fully as we would have liked. One of these extra concepts involved giving the player “prey vision”, where the camera for each individual eye would be facing in different directions (similar to how a bird has eyes on either side of its head, instead of two eyes in front). Another idea was giving the player “insect vision”, where each eye is receiving information from multiple cameras at once. We were able to confirm that these phenomena can be represented with a VR headset, and that, with proper on-boarding to ease the player into the experience, it may not be too bad of an adjustment. However, we didn’t have a chance to implement these ideas in anything more than a proof-of-concept.
Try it out!
RIT VR Design 