THE HEADSET

Go on, strap a screen to your face

The headset includes a slew of new features. One of the most, ahem, eye-grabbing of these is something called ‘foveated rendering’. This means the headset cleverly tracks what you’re looking directly at and then only renders in detail that part of the screen. As a rendering technique, it definitely presents outside-the-box thinking, so we’re asking Brendan Walker, principal engineer at VR developer Polyarc, for his expert perspective.

“[In] the human eye it turns out there’s a narrow window,” he tells us. “The [field of view] is where you’re focusing your attention and you can actually put a lot – most – of the detail there and then have lower resolution outside of that. So we [developers] are actually wasting a lot of rendering horsepower without eye tracking and putting detail where there actually doesn’t need to be as much.”

He later says, “It’s funny because it’s one of those things that engineers are excited about – we can improve performance and increase fidelity – but when it’s working right, you won’t notice because everything that’s outside of your periphery [vision], you won’t realise it’s lower resolution.”

Walker goes on to add that this particular design choice will benefit the hardware throughout its lifecycle, helping prolong its usefulness , saying, “It was smart of Sony to lean into this on a console because, you know, you have this hardware that hopefully is going to be around for quite a while.

And in order to eke out as much lifetime out of it, you need to be able to optimise where you can and this is another axis of optimisation.”

KEEP YOUR EYES PEELED

The eye-tracking tech that is so key to foveated rendering should elevate VR experiences in other ways too.

“WE’RE ACTUALLY WASTING A LOT OF RENDERING HORSEPOWER WITHOUT EYE TRACKING.”