Is VR The future? Eyes & Resolution. (Gaming)

by dogcow , Hiding from Bob, in the vent core., Tuesday, September 01, 2015, 12:45 (3159 days ago) @ electricpirate

The eye doesn't see in full resolution across its whole field of vision, only what you're looking directly at, anything in the periphery is in pretty low resolution. The computer scientist in me (who wants to optimize everything) wonders if VR makers could take advantage of that somehow. The initial problem I see is that the eye moves VERY quickly, and I doubt hardware could track & increase the resolution fast enough that you wouldn't experience "resolution pop-in".

It's called Foveated rendering, and it's being worked on :).

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Foveated_imaging

Here's an example in Unity that apparently improves performance notably.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=GKR8tM28NnQ

Cool. Foveated Rendering, now i'll know what term to follow this tech. Sounds like I was right regarding the eye-tracking. I would like to see an example where the higher resolution area is kept in the center of the video so I can just focus on it, or maybe have it move more slowly around the screen with an object in the center so I can track it, just to give you a better feel for how it would be if they were able to track your eye fast enough.

I'm glad to see my suspicions about tracking they eye being a major hurdle...

A quote from the guy who posted that video:

To become unnoticeable the eye tracking needs to be 300hz and the screen needs to be 120hz (check out the Microsoft Research paper from 2013). You get 5-6 times performance boost.
Thankfully there are other applications of foveated rendering where even a noticeable popping is fine compared to the alterative. Think real time raytracing.

As a young teen I learned how to raytrace & would wait DAYS for my poor LCII to render a simple scene. This was before I got a math coprocesor daughterboard which cut it down to somewhere between 12 & 24 hours. Many years later when Half-Life came out I was curious about using raytracing for Barney's shiny helmet and I wondered when they would have enough performance to get real-time raytracing into video games, even if it was just for reflections.