Foveated rendering

It exists... HTC Vive Pro Eye for one example. There are a couple of other non-mainstream enterprise headsets with it too I believe (starVR I think and Varjo is using eye tracking too).

It is certainly coming to more future headsets but simply put it isn’t that easy to do it really well. The human eye moves incredibly quickly and actually deforms the pupil as it starts/stops which makes tracking accurately and quickly quite difficult. Obviously the system needs to be responsive and accurate enough that you don’t end up catching a glimpse of lower res stuff while it updates your position and I think the delays in seeing wide adoption are to do with the difficulties involved in making it work 99.9% of the time for 99.9% of the users, all while at an affordable cost. Also of course the more accurate and responsive the tracking, the tighter the foveated spot can be and the bigger the potential gains.

Abrash talked a little about it in one of the more recent connect conferences I believe... iirc he still very much believes it is part of the future for headsets but it’s taking a bit longer than he had hoped. I think the latest was he predicted we might see it in 2022 from oculus.

it’s worth pointing out that good eye tracking is not just for foveated rendering either, although that is arguably the hardest part to get right. You can also use eye tracking for interaction, variable focus (as shown in the half dome prototypes), avatar animation and so on... there’s no question that it can add a huge amount to the experience.

there’s a fairly decent article on it here if you haven’t seen it:

https://www.google.co.uk/amp/s/uploadvr.com/foveated-rendering-matters/?amp
 
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