Eye tracking

[Dr Zachary Smith]

http://www.mirror.co.uk/news/technology-science/technology/ces-2015-new-software-lets-4934263

interesting as we all know, it's often more natural to look around with your eyes without moving your head, I'd like to see this in the Rift at some point

 

[rennarda]

You can already look around with your eyes.... ?

I have wondered though, with eye-tracking technology, why not use some kind of adaptive rendering so only the part of the image you're actually looking at gets rendered at full detail. The rest of the scene could be very low quality by comparison.

Your eye only really sees detail in the fovea, which is the area of most densely packed cells in the retina. The brain fills in the details, creating an impression of a fully detailed scene.

Really, 3D games are wasting most of their horsepower rendering parts of the scene the player isn't even looking at.

Flip side - that extra power could be used to render the bit you ARE looking at at much higher quality. Your brain would then do most of the work and make you think the whole scene was that high quality.