Keep an eye out for a new head-mounted display (HMD) coming from StarVR—a joint venture from Starbreeze Studios and Acer. Plans have been announced for a new HMD featuring StarVR’s ultra-high-res screens, Nozon visual effects software and, most notably, Tobii eye tracking.
The current StarVR HMD already offers an impressive 210-degree field of view (FOV) horizontally and a 5K resolution on dual 5.5-inch displays. However, with Tobii technology in eye tracking—formally known as foveated rendering—StarVR’s HMDs can be taken much further.
Foveated rendering is a digital image processing approach inspired by the center of the human eye’s retina, known as the fovea. Look at any object around you and consider how your vision fixates on that object, with the detail appearing much clearer compared to the objects in your periphery. That’s the fovea at work, delivering clarity where you want it. By understanding this aspect of human vision, developers can then focus on programming their processor to match the user’s fixation point at any given time and render that specific area. In turn, by fully rendering only a portion of the user’s FOV and not the entire 210 degrees that StarVR is capable of, developers can save loads on computational power and costs.
This is a difficult yet necessary undertaking for StarVR. The company is invested in location-based entertainment, having just launched a VR entertainment park with Emaar Entertainment in the world’s largest shopping mall, The Dubai Mall, last month. StarVR is looking to enhance this experience by developing a wireless HMD model, which will give consumers more mobility in this 75,000-square-foot space.
Achieving foveated rendering in a wireless HMD will be the most cost-efficient solution for StarVR. Until then, consumers will still have plenty to enjoy.