Improving VR with NVIDIA’s Foveated Rendering
Why Hacker News recommends it
Used as a visual example of how foveated rendering can cut the GPU power needed for VR.
What it is
A one-minute NVIDIA research demo of foveated rendering for VR using SMI eye tracking. It renders at full detail only where the eye is looking, matching the physiology of human vision.
Recommended by 0 HN commenters across 0 different months, 2017 to 2019.
What Hacker News said
Cites Sephr · 2017-03 · on “First look: Snapdragon 835 VR Developer Kit headset”
Foveated rendering is going to be the most significant step towards making mobile VR viable, so this is very good news. I'm curious as to how they will handle eye tracking. I hope it uses capacitive lenses that can track your pupil bulges instead of unweildly and power hungry internal cameras + CV processing. This is what contrast-preserving foveated rendering looks like in VR: [this video]
Cites drspacemonkey · 2017-05 · on “Facebook Is Shutting Down VR Content Division Oculus Story Studio”
>And that power could be invested into more convincing graphics and lower latency. Fortunately, that problem is pretty close to being solved on a consumer level. A foveated rendering addon module for the Vive is expected to be shipping soon in China, by Q3 in North America [0]. For anyone unfamiliar with the term, foveated rendering means only rendering high-resolution images in your field of view. Basically, you don't see full detail across your entire field of view - only at the point where your eyes are focused. Everything outside that point can be rendered in lower resolution and you'd never notice the difference. It requires high-speed eye tracking to pull off, but it can greatly reduce
Cites michaelbuckbee · 2018-03 · on “Creator”
I was really happy to see eye tracking in this list as I consider that a "gateway technology" that opens up a variety of additional really cool features. The big one is probably foveated rendering [1] which both allows for a more natural look as well as (hopefully) more efficient visuals. 1 - [this video]
Cites joefourier · 2019-02 · on “How does the Hololens 2 matter?”
Then you render with multiple cameras rotated around their centre, using the same techniques as cubemap rendering. With high field of view, rendering a single spherical view with homogeneous resolution would be inefficient for VR, not only due to the lack of hardware support (without noticeable artefacts or some subdivision scheme) and the created distortion, but also due to the foveated nature of human vision. You'd want a small view frustum rendered at a much higher pixel per angle blended with a lower resolution rendering of the entire field of view (optimally with a medium resolution view frustum surrounding the smaller one for a more progressive blending). See: [this video] With current GPUs