This is neat, but the blur shader is waaaaaay off. It looks like a focal blur that doesn't take distance into account properly. IMO, the worst thing you can do in a demo is get your post-processing wrong; in the best case you add nothing to the demo, and in the worst case you give your users a headache as they attempt to focus on your content.
The blur doesn't take distance into account at all, it simply blurs more at the top and bottom of the viewport. I don't blame the author though, depth-of-field blur is expensive to simulate accurately - look at any video game with DOF blur and before long you'll notice artefacts around the edges of foreground objects.
You are correct - it's not depth-of-field, it's fake "tilt-shift" effect that blurs screen non-uniformly based on vertical position of pixels, independently of content.
And I chose it exactly because it's much cheaper than real depth-of-field while looking "good enough" for some type of scenes (it's the same trick many photographers use to get "miniature" feel, instead of using real tilt-shit lenses they apply such blur in Photoshop).
Maybe you can turn it quite a bit down: as is it effectively creates a very strong miniature effect, except with 'living' flying birds, which ends up generating massive cognitive dissonance. It's way over the top.
Just wanted to let you know that it looks awesome. Great work! People on the internet will complain about ANYTHING. Hopefully you just ignore them. I wouldn't change a thing.
It's quite heavy on texture bandwidth. I got very smooth 60 fps on Nvidia Quadro 2000M (should be similar to GeForce 460M) and somehow stuttering 30-35 fps on ATI Radeon 3650 Mobility.
