Google Is Building A New Foveation Pipeline For Future XR Hardware
Google's R&D arm, Google Research, recently dedicated some time and resources to discovering ways to improve the performance of foveated rendering. Foveated rendering already promises vast performance improvements compared to full-resolution rendering. However, Google believes that it can do even better. The company identified three elements that could be improved, and it proposed three solutions that could potentially solve the problems, including two new foveation techniques and a reworked rendering pipeline.
Foveated rendering is a virtual reality technique that uses eye tracking to reduce the amount of image quality necessary in areas covered by the peripheral vision.
The new techniques mentioned are Phase-Aligned Rendering and Conformal Rendering.
Also at Google's Research Blog.
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(Score: 2) by Gaaark on Sunday December 10 2017, @10:12PM (4 children)
All that, and all I read was "More PATENTS! Yeah!"
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(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Monday December 11 2017, @02:04AM (3 children)
So in 20 years we can use these techniques ourselves.
Personally I just need regular (and cheap!) VR headsets, supporting basic tracking and at least 2160p per eye (ideally with quality scaling/sampling features so I can run it at lower resolution with older hardware.)
I mostly want them for johnny mnemonic style virtual navigation, augmented reality (how about some headsets with at least two cameras on the front?!?!?!) and used as a means of 'blacking out' offscreen material while using webcam probes or microscopes on low visibility subject matter.
(Score: 2) by c0lo on Monday December 11 2017, @02:34AM (2 children)
In 20 years time it's likely those techniques will be deprecated.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=aoFiw2jMy-0 https://soylentnews.org/~MichaelDavidCrawford
(Score: 2) by MichaelDavidCrawford on Monday December 11 2017, @04:42AM (1 child)
and it's still in widespread use.
So is the transistor. Perhaps you're familiar with it.
Yes I Have No Bananas. [gofundme.com]
(Score: 3, Interesting) by c0lo on Monday December 11 2017, @07:30AM
And your point is...? No, seriously, I'm curious.
Because you'll have to make serious effort to find consumer electronics which nowadays use individual transistors (the way they were patented).
(my point was: the "foveated rendering" is a technique to get around the limitations of current hardware.
In 20 years time, it is highly likey the hardware will be sufficiently performative to allow the simplification of the VR headset, eliminating the need of "eye tracker" and simplifying the gizmo. The simpler, the more robust, the lower the cost).
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=aoFiw2jMy-0 https://soylentnews.org/~MichaelDavidCrawford