Virtual reality headset

VR headsets typically include a stereoscopic display (providing separate images for each eye), stereo sound, and sensors like accelerometers and gyroscopes for tracking the pose of the user's head to match the orientation of the virtual camera with the user's eye positions in the real world.

Virtual reality headsets and viewers have also been designed for smartphones, where the device's screen is viewed through lenses acting as a stereoscope, rather than using dedicated internal displays.

However, these early headsets failed commercially due to their limited technology,[7][8] and they were described by John Carmack as like "looking through toilet paper tubes".

[9] In 2012, a crowdfunding campaign began for a VR headset known as Oculus Rift; the project was led by several prominent video game developers, including John Carmack[7] who later became the company's CTO.

[14] In 2014, Valve demonstrated some headset prototypes,[15] which led to a partnership with HTC to produce the Vive, which focuses on "room-scale" VR environments that users can naturally navigate within and interact with.

[25] In an October 2019 report, Sony, Facebook (Oculus), and HTC were identified by Trend Force as the three largest manufacturers of VR hardware.

The image clarity depends on the display resolution, optic quality, refresh rate, and field of view.

One issue is the so-called screen-door effect, where the gaps between rows and columns of pixels become visible, kind of like looking through a screen door.

The lenses of the headset are responsible for mapping the up-close display to a wide field of view,[31][32] while also providing a more comfortable distant point of focus.

[35] Virtual reality headsets have significantly higher requirements for latency—the time it takes from a change in input to have a visual effect—than ordinary video games.

Oculus cited the limited processing power of Xbox One and PlayStation 4 as the reason why they targeted the PC gaming market with their first devices.

Now, with the use of VR headsets, students can watch surgical procedures from the perspective of the lead surgeon without missing essential parts.

[citation needed] VR headset mounted smartphones have been used to capture high-quality videos and images of the retina for documenting peripheral retinal lesions.

The advantages consist of repeating the situations multiple times and the cost of having the headset is less, due to no military equipment being needed.