Oculus Rift Field of View
There has been quite a lot of hype around the Oculus Rift. Being brought forward as some kind of revolution in the field of virtual reality. The Oculus brings three things that has not been seen combined to a singe unit in the VR community before: cheap, high field of veiw, head tracking head mounted display. Previous HMDs have only featured 2 of these properties. Namely that they have either been incredibly expensive, or featured a low FOV.
Owning an Oculus Rift Development Kit myself I can say that the immersion and experience provided by it is nothing like a monitor or S3D monitor. By covering a massive 110° FOV diagonally and masking the rest out, it truly makes it feel like you are in the game. This illusion is far from perfect and suffers many artifacts, but easily dwarfs anything an S3D monitor can deliver.
The Development Kit has been critizised for having a low resulution. With only 1280x800 pixels or 640x800 pixels per eye the resolution is indeed low. But simply increasing this to 1080p HD is not going to make a dent in the pixel density per degree compared to a regular desktop monitor. This is neatly illustrated by this image of my desktop.
Don't let the 180° equisolid fisheye projection fool you. This image is taken from the same position that my eyes would be in when I play games on the computer. The FOV the monitor covers is only 32° x 20° or about 1/11th the area the Rift covers. This implies that to reach the same amount of pixel density as the monitor the Rift would require 3x the resolution of the monitor. Since this monitor is 1680x1050 pixels this boils down to an unreal 5040x3150 pixels, making 1080p FullHD a tiny window in comparison. Even 4k is no match for this behermoth of a resolution.
When it comes to making immersive VR it's not about the resolution, it's the field of view and how accurately this behaves like the real world. If your view is a tiny window, like the monitor in the image, then you lose the feeling of being inside. Especially if you project something like 90° of FOV to this surface.