: What is this shifted red and blue effect often seen in VR called? How can I achieve it? I'm looking for more information regarding a specific type of visual effect that I have been trying

@Twilah924

This is called chromatic aberration. Here's an example from Wikimedia:



The Oculus Developer Guide (PDF) provides a nice explanation:


Chromatic aberration is a visual artifact seen when viewing images through lenses. The phenomenon causes colored fringes to be visible around objects, and is increasingly more apparent as our view shifts away from the center of the lens.

Fortunately, programmable GPUs provide the means to significantly reduce the degree of visible chromatic aberration... This is done by pre-transforming the image so that after the lens causes chromatic aberration, the end result is a more normal looking image.


So the effect your seeing is added to the virtual reality games to actually reduce distortion due to chromatic aberration. I've found an interesting PDF that explains this technique: Improved Pre-Warping for Wide Angle, Head Mounted Displays

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@Cooney243

This effect can normally be found under the name RGB Twitch, RGB Slide, RGB distortion, RGB displacement, etc.

So, from what you can see, this is a visual reference to the old RGB screens that on occasion would show the image with the colour channels displaced, thus resulting in unexpected or undesired effects.

There are several ways of doing this, and though I've normally used this effect in video editing in After Effects, it can be achieved in Photoshop as well. A quick search popped this quick and easy tutorial.

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