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Apple's Working on a Powerful, Wireless Headset for Both AR, VR (cnet.com)
Apple CEO Tim Cook has nothing but praise for augmented reality, saying it's a technology that's potentially as important as the iPhone. It turns out he may have big plans for virtual reality too. From a report: The company is working on a headset capable of running both AR and VR technology, according to a person familiar with Apple's plans. Plans so far call for an 8K display for each eye -- higher resolution than today's best TVs -- that would be untethered from a computer or smartphone, the person said. The project, codenamed T288, is still in its early stages but is slated for release in 2020. Apple still could change or scrap its plans. It's notable that Apple is working on a headset that combines both AR and VR given its intense focus over the past year on pushing augmented reality in iPhones and iPads. Cook has said he sees bigger possibilities in AR than VR, partly because augmented reality allows you to be more present. Either way, it's vital for Apple to expand beyond its iPhones, currently its top moneymaker, and the slowing mobile market.
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The only thing that this makes the needle on my give'o'shit meter shiver is that this might help push VR more main stream.
I read at +2. If your post doesn't reach that level I will not see or respond to it.
Powerful hardware isn't necessary when they have eye tracking and foveated rendering. The human eye only sees high resolution in a tiny spot in the center, everything else can be rendered at much lower resolutions.
AR doesn't completely fill the view, they only have to display the virtual objects/environment/etc.
It also depends on the level of details they're targeting. Just because they want to use 8K displays doesn't mean the end result has to look like the best games on the market today. For all we know, they could very well use flat shading with no textures, etc. The use of 8K may only be to avoid having "pixel edges".
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Latency is the problem. A wireless system will have to compress the video, transmit it with extra error correction data, and decode it for display.
It also adds more latency to the head tracking sensors.
VR is extremely sensitive to latency. Not to mention power hungry.
const int one = 65536; (Silvermoon, Texture.cs)
SJW, n: "Someone I don't like, and by the way I'm a fuckwit" - AC
Foveated rendering? That would add further savings but I doubt it's practical. You would need a ridiculously low latency, I don't believe in it. Perhaps a very broad notion of where your eyes are looking can be used to determine which broad areas are rendered at half res.. That'd be all.
Bandwidth of present day HDMI/DP links is already something like 2000 times that of the human optic nerve and yet this is still at least 100 times short of what would actually be required to drive a VR display to the limit of human vision using current photon spamming techniques.
Regardless of challenges of Foveated rendering it WILL HAPPEN no matter what. There is no viable path forward that does not involve foveated rendering.
Foveated rendering? That would add further savings but I doubt it's practical. You would need a ridiculously low latency, I don't believe in it.
What kind of ridiculously low latency do you think you could get if you only render a 600x600 image? How long do you think it takes for a saccade to track and stabilize?
I'd imagine you'd have two rendering paths, one for a low-resolution overall image, one to track the eye and render that 600x600 image at the predicted point that the eye will be looking at in the next millisecond. Update about 1000 times per second.
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