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Lagging, juddery, frame dropped game is a gamer’s nightmare. To have a smooth and pleasing gameplay experience, the frame rates need to be around 60fps for PC/Consoles. Game developers try every possible way to make the game as light as possible. VR games however, need a frame rate of 90 fps for a minimal non-nauseating experience. Producing such high frame rate becomes even more challenging when you are running applications on your phone, or standalone VR devices like Oculus Go. And hence comes the need of foveated rendering.
Explain please!
Foveated rendering in VR is a smart way of saving workload on the GPU by rendering only the significant part of the application in higher resolution and remaining at a lower resolution. There are various ways in which this can be implemented!
Fixed Foveated Rendering tries to emulate the human peripheral vision. It does this by rendering the pixels near edges of the screen at a lower resolution than the center. This reduces the GPU load as a result of the reduction in pixel shading and fragment shading requirements. It can also be called as multi-resolution rendering.
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The image shows the sections of the eye buffer with resolution change in patches. As you move away from the center of the buffer, the resolution reduces in steps. (Source: Oculus Developer Blog)
Foveated Rendering with Eye Tracking
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FOVE HEADSET. The first VR headset to use eye tracking!
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Eye tracking was used in VR for the first time by FOVE, a Tokyo based startup, in their HMD announced in 2014. Since then, lot of companies including HTC and Facebook Oculus have been trying to push eye tracking in their premium headsets. When you have an eye tracker inside the headset, you know where the player is looking. Accordingly, the resolution of the area around the gazing point can be increased, and the resolution on the periphery of it can be decreased. This is way more accurate and gives a better experience as compared to Fixed foveated rendering.
Apart from a dynamic multi-resolution display, there are numerous use cases of eye tracking! Both in VR and non VR applications. Would soon be posting an article on eye tracking in games! :) Stay tuned for more techie content!