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FOVE's eye-tracking VR headset is finally shipping: Here's why it's special
FOVE's eye-tracking VR headset is finally shipping: Here's why it's special
Plenty of virtual reality headsets have hit the market since we first saw FOVE back in May 2015, but none can do what the Samsung-backed VR system can. Differentiating itself in the increasingly crowded entertainment space by its potentially game-changing eye tracking system, FOVE sets out to address what it calls the "owl problem".
Whoa, I haven't heard of this but this is awesome. Foveated rendering should allow developers to push quality while also improving FPS.
Because of the way the human eye works, our peripheral vision is at a far lower quality compared to what we’re looking at directly. Foveated rendering takes advantage of that fact: the point being focused on is at the highest resolution the system can supply, but it saves GPU cycles and power by lowering the resolution of everything else. In the demo I tried, I couldn’t notice any real difference between how the scene looked when foveated rendering was toggled on or off, which is just what you would want to be the case.
The potential savings are significant. FOVE says it could cut up GPU use by up to 75-percent, in fact, though in practice what generally happens is that some of that saving is then spent on making the scene more visually effective. A depth-of-field effect, for instance, would be impractical if applied to the whole scene universally, but can be implemented while still saving 50-percent over a non-foveated view.



