Today's VR Headsets are low resolution. If your video source is higher resolution than the display then it must be downsampled. Downsampling will introduce aliasing artifacts unless an anti-aliasing pass is preformed prior to downsampling.
> Image scaling can be interpreted as a form of image resampling or image reconstruction from the view of the Nyquist sampling theorem. According to the theorem, downsampling to a smaller image from a higher-resolution original can only be carried out after applying a suitable 2D anti-aliasing filter to prevent aliasing artifacts. The image is reduced to the information that can be carried by the smaller image.
In an ideal situation, your source resolution would match your target resolution. If it doesn't then you must expend resources scaling. VR can't leverage the 2D scalers found in most hardware since the source data is being mapped into 3D space. If you have to downscale your source then on top of the processing resources being used to scale in 3d space, you're also wasting bandwidth delivering those resources at a higher resolution.
I really don't like the idea that it's good enough now since the headset block us. Technology innovation can come from every area. If others make better 360 cameras or players and exceed the 5K experience, they should not considered as "wasted" just because one kind of display headset doesn't meet the same level. I do like Oculus Go for its nice price and acceptable experience. But there are quite some headsets that perform better, at least capable to display 8K or even above, Vive Focus, Gear VR with S8 and S9, and the upcoming Pimax. So, please don't block others and ourselves on technology innovation! Eventually if we take human eyes as the ideal benchmark, we need to achieve 16K!
I don't think he's advocating that we stick to 5k but rather that 5k is good enough for today's devices and as they improve we can up the resolution.
Advocating for higher than necessary resolutions today based on future prospects is a bad gamble because consumer adoption is still in it's infancy. What if you make a poor user experience today in anticipation of a better experience tomorrow but instead kill the market so there is no tomorrow?
Video game developers and video content providers are both well versed in dynamically scaling to match the capabilities of the consumer.
Eh is it wasting memory bandwidth, sure, but let's not pretend a modern smartphone GPU is breaking much of a sweat rendering some 5k textures into a >x framebuffer.
> Image scaling can be interpreted as a form of image resampling or image reconstruction from the view of the Nyquist sampling theorem. According to the theorem, downsampling to a smaller image from a higher-resolution original can only be carried out after applying a suitable 2D anti-aliasing filter to prevent aliasing artifacts. The image is reduced to the information that can be carried by the smaller image.
- https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Image_scaling
In an ideal situation, your source resolution would match your target resolution. If it doesn't then you must expend resources scaling. VR can't leverage the 2D scalers found in most hardware since the source data is being mapped into 3D space. If you have to downscale your source then on top of the processing resources being used to scale in 3d space, you're also wasting bandwidth delivering those resources at a higher resolution.