[Researchers figured out a way to compress a full 360-degree horizontal view in a virtual reality headset into normal 90-degree neck movement, and apparently it quickly becomes natural and intuitive for the user. Some of the details are reported in the short stories from Hackaday and Shining Science below. –Matthew]

Giving People An Owl-like Visual Field Via VR Feels Surprisingly Natural
By Donald Papp
July 16, 2024
We love hearing about a good experiment, and here’s a pretty neat one: researchers used a VR headset, an off-the-shelf VR360 camera, and some custom software to glue them together. The result? Owl-Vision squashes a full 360° of un-distorted horizontal visual perception into 90° of neck travel to either side. One can see all around oneself, without needing to physically turn one’s head any further than is natural.
It’s still a work in progress, and accessing the paper currently doesn’t have a free option, but the demonstration video at that link (also embedded [in the original story]) gives a solid overview of what’s going on.
The user wears a VR headset with a 360° camera perched on their head. This camera has a fisheye lens on the front and back, and stitches the inputs together to make a 360° panorama. The headset shows the user a segment of this panorama as a normal camera view, but the twist is that the effect from turning one’s head is amplified.
Turning one’s head 45 degrees to the left displays as though one’s head turned 90 degrees, and turning 90 degrees (i.e. looking straight left) displays the view directly behind. One therefore compresses an entire 360 degrees of horizontal visual awareness into the normal 180 degree range of neck motion for a person, without having to resort to visual distortions like squashing the video.
In a way this calls to mind the experiments of American psychologist George Stratton, whose fascinating work in visual perception involved wearing special eyeglasses that inverted or mirrored his sight. After a few days, he was able to function normally. Owl-Vision seems very much along those lines, albeit much less intensive. It’s apparently quite intuitive to use, with wearers needing very little time to become accustomed. Messing with perception via VR has gone the other way, too. Adding lag to real life is remarkably debilitating for interactive tasks.
The short video demo for Owl-Vision also includes a driving simulator demo in which the driver shows off the ability to look directly behind themselves with ease.
Reference: Kitazaki, M., Onodera, R., Kataoka, J., Inoue, Y., Iwasaki, Y., & Ganesh, G. (2024, April). Owl-Vision: Augmentation of Visual Field by Virtual Amplification of Head Rotation. In Proceedings of the Augmented Humans International Conference 2024 (pp. 275-277). DOI: 10.1145/3652920.3653048
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[From Shining Science]
VR headset can give you 360-degree vision like an owl
By Editorial Team
May 20, 2024
[snip]
Normally, humans only have a 180-degree range of vision by turning our heads from side to side. This increases to 240 degrees if we move our eyes and 360 degrees if we rotate our abdomen too. But this isn’t always comfortable task and may not be possible in some situations.
Ganesh Gowrishankar at the Montpellier Laboratory of Computer Science, Robotics, and Microelectronics in France and his colleagues have developed a system that allows a user to easily see all the way around with just small neck movements.
The team added a 360-degree camera to the top of an HTC Vive Pro Eye headset, which can measure head rotation and display a portion of the panoramic video feed from the camera.
The researchers also added a layer of software that doubles the head rotation when selecting what part of the camera feed to show. This means that when the wearer turns their head 10 degrees, their field of view is rotated 20 degrees. When turning their neck 90 degrees to one side, they can see directly behind.
Gowrishankar says that test subjects quickly adapted to how far they needed to rotate their head and where they needed to reach out with their hands to touch an object they saw – but they needed a similarly short period to re-adapt once they took the device off.
“It doesn’t overload your cognitive system. It provides you the agency to see where you want,” says Gowrishankar. “Surprisingly, it’s quite easy – you don’t get very surprised by it and you are able to just understand it very quickly, and adapt to it as well. So it seems to work very well from my perspective.”
The researchers believe the technique could find practical applications where people are seated and working in virtual or augmented reality. For instance, a fighter pilot could look all the way behind for adversaries, or a robot operator could see a remote site in 360 degrees.
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