David J. Kordsmeier 🟧 ☮️ ✪ (コーズマイヤ)

Trista and I saw NIN last night with friends, and it was a great show, as always. I inevitably wind up thinking about the gap between the live event experience and reproductions on video or in VR. The gap is substantial, with the “shock and awe” of high powered, extreme dynamic range stadium effects, but there are still levers to pull. A capability of the Quest VR hardware that would be fun to exploit is per-frame varying of the display persistence. The low-persistence display is only flashed “on” for about a tenth of each frame, so it doesn’t look blurred as you move your head around. This is a tradeoff between screen brightness and blur, which is just statically picked by Meta today, but it could be done dynamically on a per-frame basis (coordination would be tricky!). Going to full persistence briefly would give an instant 10x brightness increase, which would be quite impactful on eyes adapted to the 10% brightness. You wouldn’t want to keep it there for long, because the blurring would be obnoxious and eyes would adapt to it, but it would be perfect for the epilepsy-inducing concert light flashes. The clean way to do it would be with a 16 bit high dynamic range linear buffer that gets factored into an sRGB image for the display and a backlight flight time, but a hacky extra parameter latched with the frame submit would be the easiest thing to experiment with. Make it work, then make it clean! A tech demo would be fun, but Beat Saber has a large enough user base that stepping up “concert lighting effects” might even be worth it from a net user value standpoint.