Foveated rendering

[Gortron]

I read this article from the BBC during my lunch break at work today and thought I'd share it ("Virtual reality as sharp as the eye can see").

Rather interesting; I think this tech has been discussed here before and interesting development none the less. Hopefully this sort of bleeding edge tech will filter down to affordable levels sooner or later.

 

[Cheapchips]

The way Varjo's tech works is interesting. They use what would be normal VR displays as background and use a mirror to blend the image with a micro display for the centre of the image. For eye tracking, they'll have to either move the micro display or the mirror arrangement very quickly to keep the high res area at the centre of your vision. They're not targeting consumers with their first product, so unlikely to have ED support.

Hopefully conventional eye tracked FOV rendering will find its way into version 2 of the Rift and Vive. It could double the apparent resolution without having to have four times the gpu power required.

 

[Jakester13]

Thread Ninja!

o7

But yeah, interesting technology...

easier on the cpu/gpu than 2 4K displays

 

[[HJ]-RedRaven]

There's several ways to skin the cat so to speak with foveated rendering. Sounds like Varjo is going for the opto-mechanical route with a moving smaller higher res screen. Will be interesting to see how long that actually lasts, consumer version or not. Sounds like little fiddly bits which will break.

Its only a matter of time until very high res (retina or higher pixel density) are freely available and don't cost a kidney (or both!)... then the simpler software render-at-max-res only at the eye tracked position and much-less-else-where approach will become the norm.