We are setting up demos in our lab for visitors, so they can quickly get a taste of future reality. The Oculus Quest is great for this, but not quite perfect.
If you take off the headset, it exits the VR experience. When you go back in again, you need to use your controller to click on a menu in VR to get back in again.
That isn’t going to work for casual visitors. We want them to simply put on the headset and immediately be “in world”.
I solve part of the problem by putting a little piece of masking tape over the photosensor that the headset uses to detect that you’ve taken it off. That works great, but it has the problem that the display is always running, which will eventually burn out the headset’s display screen.
So today I added a little software hack. If the headset doesn’t move at all for ten seconds, the entire virtual world goes completely black. As soon as the headset moves again, it then immediately returns to full brightness.
In practice, this means that when somebody takes off the headset and puts it down on a table, the display goes black ten seconds later, thereby avoiding display screen burnout. The moment they grab the headset to put it back on, the display immediately goes back to normal. Yet behind the scenes, our software is still running, blissfully unaware that anything is amiss.
This all might seem trivial, but I think it’s going to make a big difference. When a random visitor stops by who might be inclined to support our lab’s work, we don’t want to have to tell them to wait. Even a slight delay, or fumbling with VR controllers, might mean we miss the chance to ever show them what the future looks like.
Also, do you really want a future where you’d need to click on some stupid menu just to make your glasses work properly? I know I don’t.
Are screen burnouts still a thing? It was clearly a concern in the CRT days, and maybe a bit of concern when LCDs were still using fluorescent tubes. But in an era of LED backlights or OLED displays, the goggles are likely to simply become obsolete before the display wears out.
That said, I do miss the lively art form of the 1990s screen saver apps. Maybe there’s a VR equivalent? Hold perfectly still for five minutes and winged toasters start flying by…