I see font rendering is not adapted to 3D in the screenshot, so it is not yet ready for serious UI work. I presume curves are not rendered in an adapted way either, so everything will look pixelated around the edges.
StereoKit doesn't currently do SDF font rendering yet, no, but there is some shader work done to help make existing text a bit clearer than the naive case. It does support Unicode font rendering though, font glyphs are added to the font atlas on-demand to ensure that's a smooth and automatic experience!
The current implementation of SDF conversion is just a tad too slow to make on-demand glyph rendering comfortable right now, so there's a bit of additional optimization work that needs done before we can switch to that. We were just prioritizing language support over text clarity to start with.
I would say that the majority of people don't notice StereoKit uses regular raster for font rendering! However, that number is definitely not zero, and there's definitely people that can spot it right away, as evidenced. Designers in particular would probably spot it right away.
I'd say it's primarily a question of polish and feel! Those that can't spot it right away would still prefer SDF fonts in a side-by-side, and the difference becomes much more clear if you start getting your head really close to the text. I consider it to be an essential feature for a 1.0 version, but not a blocker for right now.
I actually worry more about looking at longer and smaller text in 3D. It is noticeably harder to read, which prevents many use cases. For instance, you would not read HN in VR using an RSS reader built with StereoKit.
Ah yeah I think there's a collection of issues related to small text within XR! The biggest one is really pixel density on XR headsets, which is always an issue for small text, or far-away text. XR also can't benefit from sub-pixel approaches to font rendering either. Since you can always move further from text, there's also the IRL issue that the text is just too far to make out!
The current raster technique should actually be fine for smaller text, there's some super-sampling going on in the shader that should help a bit here too! I'm not entirely certain what else could be improved on in this case besides font selection, I'd be open to suggestions or tips :)
I am not an expert in the area, just somebody who read up on it after realizing desktop in VR does not work out for me (and usually low res is not a problem, so it is about font aliasing).
Thanks for the link! The path based approach has been of interest to me, but I wasn't aware of an implementation other than Slug, which I have been avoiding. Guess I can finally do some real research on that topic now! :D
SDF is probably still the most realistic path for now, but I guess that may depend a bit on what comes up :)
