khedron

From The Information, which is apparently an email newsletter I'm getting free previews for. Email also had links to Facebook/Oculus work on extracting audio of interest from a noisy background.

Virtual reality is about to get a big visual upgrade.

Tucked into a presentation Monday at Nvidia’s annual tech conference was the revelation that the company will start including technology in its graphics chip software that significantly enhances the visual quality of VR experiences.

The change centers around something known as foveated rendering, which allows users to see more detail where their eyes are actually looking, and less on the periphery. That makes VR apps and games look better while potentially boosting apps’ performance.

One reason the VR community is so excited about the news is that the new Nvidia software makes this form of foveated rendering easy to include without additional work by game and app developers.

For now, only users with high-end PC VR setups that already offer eye-tracking and use Nvidia graphics cards will be able to take advantage of the new technology. But eventually, headsets on the more affordable end of the spectrum are expected to have eye-tracking hardware, too.

Meanwhile, PC VR users with competing AMD graphics cards will be left waiting until that company offers similar foveated rendering features in its software. As for users of Facebook’s Oculus, CEO Mark Zuckerberg has talked about bringing eye-tracking into future headsets, but it isn’t clear how soon that will happen.

Nvidia worked with Swedish eye-tracking specialist Tobii on the technology. On top of its software work, Tobii supplies the eye-tracker hardware in enterprise and research-oriented headsets such as the Vive Pro Eye and HP’s coming Omnicept headset.

Foveated rendering is something a lot of VR early adopters have been waiting for before upgrading to newer headsets. With this software breakthrough, it will be interesting to see how quickly manufacturers will start delivering eye-tracking headsets at a price that won’t break the bank.