ODG R-9 (Horizon): 1080p Per Eye, Yes Really

Lazy Reporting – The Marketing Hyperbole’s Friend

While I have not ODG’s R-9 in person yet, I fully expect that it will look a lot better than Microsoft’s Hololens. I even think it will look better in terms of image quality than what I think ML is working on. But that is not the key point of this article.

But there is also a layer of marketing hyperbole and misreporting going on that I wanted to clear up. I’m just playing referee hear and calling it like a see them.

ODG 4K “Experience” with 2K (1080p) Per Eye

2016-12-28 Update – It appears I was a bit behind on the marketing hype vernacular being used in VR. Most VR displays today, such as Oculus, take a single flat panel and split it between two eyes. So each eye sees less than half (some pixels are cut off) of the pixels. Since bigger is better in marketing, VR makers like to quote the whole flat panel size and not the resolution per eye.

ODG “marketing problem” is that historically a person working with near eye displays would talk in in terms of “resolution per eye” but this would not be as big by 2X as the flat panel based VR companies market. Rather than being at a marketing hype disadvantage, ODG apparently has adopted the VR flat panel vernacular, however misleading it might be.

I have not met Jame Mackie nor have I watched a lot of his videos, but he obviously does not understand display technology well and I would take anything he says about video quality with a grain of salt. If should have understood that ODG’s R-9 has is not “4K” as in the title of his YouTube video: ODG 4K Augmented Reality Review, better than HoloLens ?. And specifically he should of asked questions when the ODG employee stated at about 2:22, “it’s two 1080p displays to each eye, so it is offering a 4K experience.“

What the ODG marketing person was I think trying to say was that somehow having 1080p (also known as 2K) for each eye was like having a 2 times 2K or “4K equivalent” it is not. In stumbling to try and make the “4K equivalent” statement, the ODG person simply tripped over his own tongue to and said that there were two 1080p devices per eye, when he meant to say there were two 1080p devices in the glasses (one per eye). Unfortunately Jame Mackie didn’t know the difference and did not realize that this would have been impossible in the R-9’s form factor and didn’t follow up with a question. So the false information got copied into the title of the video and was left as if it was true.

VRMA’s Micah Blumberg Asks The Right Questions and Get The Right Answer – 1080p Per Eye

This can be cleared up in the following video interview with Nima Shams, ODG’s VP of Headworn: “Project Horizon” AR VR Headset by VRMA Virtual Reality Media“. When asked by Micah Blumberg starting at about 3:50 into the video, “So this is the 4K headset” to which Nima Sham responds, “so it is 1080p to each eye” to which Blumberg astutely makes sure to clarify with, “so we’re seeing 1080p right now and not 4K” to which Nima Sham responds, “okay, yeah, you are seeing 2K to each eye independently“. And they even added an overlay in the video “confirmed 2K per eye.” (see inside the read circle I added).

A Single 1080p OLED Microdisplay Per Eye

Even with “only” 1080p OLED microdisplay per eye with a simple optical path the ODG R-9 should have superior image quality compared to Hololens:

OLEDs should give better contrast than Hololens’ Himax LCOS device
There will be no field sequential color breakup with head or image movment as there can be with Hololens
They have about the same pixels per arc-minute at Hololens but with more pixels they increase FOV from about 37 degrees to about 50 degrees.
Using a simple plate combiner rather than the torturous path of Hololens’ waveguide, I would expect the pixels to be sharper and with little visible chroma aberrations and no “waveguide glow” (out of focus light around bright objects). So even though the angular resolution of the two is roughly the same, I would expect the R-9 to look sharper/higher resolution.

The known downsides compared to Hololens:

The ODG R-9 does not appear to have enough “eye relief” to support wearing glasses.
The device puts a lot of weight on the nose and ears of the user.

I’m not clear about the level of tracking but ODG’s R-9 does not appear to have the number of cameras and sensors that Hololens has for mapping/locking the real world. We will have to wait and see for more testing on this issue. I also don’t have information on how comparable the level of image and other processing is done by the ODG relative to Horizon.

Conclusion

Micah Blumberg showed the difference between just repeating what he is told and knowing enough to ask the right followup question. He knew that ODG had a 4K marketing message was confusing and that what he was being told was at odds with what he was being told so he made sure to clarify it. Unfortunately while James Makie got the “scoop” on the R-9 being the product name for Horizon, he totally misreported the resolution and other things in his report (more on that later).

Lazy and ill informed reporters are the friend and amplifier of marketing hyperbole. It appears that ODG is trying to equate dual 1080p displays per eye with being something like “4K” which is really is not. You need 1080p (also known as 2K) per eye to do stereo 1080p, but that is not the same as “4K” which which is defined as 3840×2060 resolution or 4 times the spatial resolution of 1080p. Beyond this, qualifiers of like “4K “Experience” which has no real meaning are easily dropped and ill informed reporters will report it as “4K” which does have a real meaning.

Also, my point is not meant to pick on ODG, they just happen to be the case at hand. Unfortunately, most of the display market is “liars poker.” Companies are fudging on display specs all the time. I rarely see a projector that meets or exceeds it “spec” lumens. Resolutions are often spec’ed in misleading ways (such as specifying the input rather than the “native” resolution). Contrast is another place were “creative marketing” is heavily used. The problem is that because “everyone is doing it” people feel they have to just to keep up.

The problem for me comes when I have to deal with people that have read false or misleading information. It gets hard to separate truth from marketing exaggeration.

This also goes back to why I didn’t put much stock in the magazine reports about Magic Leap looked. These reports were made by people that were easy to impress and likely not knowledgeable about display devices. They probably could not tell the display resolution by 2X in each direction or would notice even moderately severe image problems. If they were shown a flashy looking demo they would assume it was high resolution.

One More Thing – Misleading/Fake “True Video”

It will take a while to explain (maybe next time), I believe the James Makie video also falsely indicates at 2:29 in the video (the part with the cars and the metal balls on the table), that what is being shown is how the ODG R-9 works.

In fact, while the images of the cars and balls are generated by the R-9, there tracking of the real world and the reflections off the surfaces are a well orchestrated FAKE. Basically they were playing a pre-rendered video though the glasses (so that part is likely real). But clear and black boxes on the table where props there to “sell the viewer” that this was being rendered on the fly. There also appears to be some post-processing in the video. Most notably, it looks like the black box was modified in post production. There are several clues in the video that will take a while to explain.

To be fair to ODG, the video does not claim to not be fake/processed, but the way it is presented within Jame Makie’s video is extremely misleading to say the least. It could be that the video was taken out of context.

For the record, I do believe the video starting at 4:02 which I have analyze before is a genuine through the optics video and is correctly so identified on the video. I’m not sure about the “tape replacement” video at 3:23, I think it may be genuine or it could be some cleaver orchestrating.