Yeah, headset resolution is limited but that's why it's important to make the most of what you have. As I understand it the SDK quad and cylinder layers bypass the lens distortion pass and effectively analytically ray trace the optimal sample point for direct display. Carmack is always telling people to use them for anything text heavy. I haven't done a side by side comparison but this is probably why Dash text is a bit more legible than yours. Future headsets will have higher resolution but we're years away from high enough for this stuff not to matter.
As an experienced VR user my expectation at this point is that I can move panels around with my hands and ideally scale them too. Doing that well and in a way that doesn't trip up novice users isn't trivial though, Dash still has some work to do there.
I don't mean to be overly critical, my first VR app (for the DK2!) was written from scratch in C++ so I know how much work goes into developing something like this without an engine. I want this type of app to succeed so I can use it though so the feedback is intended to be constructive!
I don't take this as overly critical. We need and welcome feedback.
Looking at layers for text is something we will definitely do. We are happy with SDF text in our UI, but text inside of Chromium is miles from acceptable and will continue to be a focus.
As far as scalable and user positional UI, we currently hold the opinion that it doesn't offer enough value to compensate for the complication that it introduces, especially for novice users. At the same time, we realize that is a contrarian point of view and user frustration may force us to change it. We have to remain open to changing opinions like these.
Agree with Doug's response, but wanted to quickly say thanks for pointing us at the SDK layers thing - will dig into it!
We spent a fair bit of time building out this pretty unique node-based pipeline architecture, where the HMD is effectively just a sink node. We made an attempt to make text / content more legible by the way of an FXAA implementation, which would have limited performance impact as compared to something like MSAA - but it definitely can get a lot better. Will dig into that stuff, and hopefully we can improve it further!
As an experienced VR user my expectation at this point is that I can move panels around with my hands and ideally scale them too. Doing that well and in a way that doesn't trip up novice users isn't trivial though, Dash still has some work to do there.
I don't mean to be overly critical, my first VR app (for the DK2!) was written from scratch in C++ so I know how much work goes into developing something like this without an engine. I want this type of app to succeed so I can use it though so the feedback is intended to be constructive!