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Foveated rendering

From HandWiki - Reading time: 6 min

Short description: Rendering technique in which image quality is reduced in the peripheral vision

Foveated rendering is a rendering technique which uses an eye tracker integrated with a virtual reality headset to reduce the rendering workload by greatly reducing the image quality in the peripheral vision (outside of the zone gazed by the fovea).[1][2]

A less sophisticated variant called fixed foveated rendering doesn't utilise eye tracking and instead assumes a fixed focal point.[3][4]

History

Research into foveated rendering dates back at least to 1991.[5]

At Tech Crunch Disrupt SF 2014, Fove unveiled a headset featuring foveated rendering.[6] This was followed by a successful kickstarter in May 2015.[7]

At CES 2016, SensoMotoric Instruments (SMI) demoed a new 250 Hz eye tracking system and a working foveated rendering solution. It resulted from a partnership with camera sensor manufacturer Omnivision who provided the camera hardware for the new system.[8][9]

In July 2016, Nvidia demonstrated during SIGGRAPH a new method of foveated rendering claimed to be invisible to users.[1][10]

In February 2017, Qualcomm announced their Snapdragon 835 Virtual Reality Development Kit (VRDK) which includes foveated rendering support called Adreno Foveation.[11][12]

Use

According to chief scientist Michael Abrash at Oculus, utilising foveated rendering in conjunction with sparse rendering and deep learning image reconstruction has the potential to require an order of magnitude fewer pixels to be rendered in comparison to a full image.[13] Later, these results have been demonstrated and published.[14]

In December 2019, fixed foveated rendering support was added to the Oculus Quest SDK.[15] A number of VR headsets have included on-board eye tracking to provide support for foveated rendering, including HTC's Vive Pro Eye (2019),[16][17] Meta Quest Pro (2022),[18] PlayStation VR2 (2023),[19] and Apple Vision Pro (2024).[20][21]

In 2025, Valve announced the upcoming Steam Frame headset, which applies a variation of the technique known as "foveated streaming" for wireless streaming from a PC to the headset; the method similarly uses variance in bit rate, and is performed at the encoder level rather than the software level.[22][23]

See also

References

  1. ↑ 1.0 1.1 Parrish, Kevin (2016-07-22). "Nvidia plans to prove that new method improves image quality in virtual reality". Digital Trends. http://www.digitaltrends.com/virtual-reality/nvidia-research-foveated-rendering-vr-smi/. 
  2. ↑ "Understanding Foveated Rendering". Sensics. 2016-04-11. http://sensics.com/understanding-foveated-rendering/. 
  3. ↑ Carbotte, Kevin (30 March 2018). "What Is Fixed Foveated Rendering, And Why Does It Matter?". https://www.tomshardware.com/news/oculus-fixed-foveated-rendering-technology,36781.html. 
  4. ↑ Orland, Kyle (21 March 2016). "How Valve got passable VR running on a four-year-old graphics card". https://arstechnica.com/gaming/2016/03/how-valve-got-passable-vr-running-on-a-four-year-old-graphics-card/. 
  5. ↑ Wang, Lili; Shi, Xuehuai; Liu, Yi (2023). "Foveated rendering: A state-of-the-art survey". Computational Visual Media 9 (2): 195–228. doi:10.1007/s41095-022-0306-4. 
  6. ↑ "FOVE Uses Eye Tracking To Make Virtual Reality More Immersive" (in en-US). 10 September 2014. https://techcrunch.com/2014/09/09/fove/. 
  7. ↑ "FOVE: The World's First Eye Tracking Virtual Reality Headset" (in en). 20 January 2017. https://www.kickstarter.com/projects/fove/fove-the-worlds-first-eye-tracking-virtual-reality. 
  8. ↑ Mason, Will (2016-01-15). "SMI's 250Hz Eye Tracking and Foveated Rendering Are For Real, and the Cost May Surprise You". UploadVR. http://uploadvr.com/smi-hands-on-250hz-eye-tracking/. 
  9. ↑ Mason, Will (2016-01-15). "SMI's 250Hz Eye Tracking and Foveated Rendering Are For Real, and the Cost May Surprise You" (in en-US). https://uploadvr.com/smi-hands-on-250hz-eye-tracking/. 
  10. ↑ "NVIDIA Partners with SMI on Innovative Rendering Technique That Improves VR". Nvidia. 2016-01-21. https://blogs.nvidia.com/blog/2016/07/21/rendering-foveated-vr/. 
  11. ↑ "Qualcomm Introduces Snapdragon 835 Virtual Reality Development Kit" (in en). 2017-02-23. https://www.qualcomm.com/news/releases/2017/02/23/qualcomm-introduces-snapdragon-835-virtual-reality-development-kit. 
  12. ↑ "Foveation in Game Engines". https://vr.tobii.com/sdk/learn/foveation/rendering/in-game-engines/#qualcomm-adreno-foveation. 
  13. ↑ Oculus (2018-09-26), Oculus Connect 5 | Keynote Day 01, https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=o7OpS7pZ5ok&t=1h30m38s, retrieved 2018-09-30 
  14. ↑ Kaplanyan, Anton (2020-05-15). "DeepFovea: AR/VR rendering, inspired by human vision". https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=o7OpS7pZ5ok&t=1h30m38s. 
  15. ↑ "Oculus Quest gets dynamic fixed foveated rendering" (in en-US). 2019-12-22. https://venturebeat.com/2019/12/22/oculus-quest-gets-dynamic-fixed-foveated-rendering/. 
  16. ↑ Statt, Nick (2019-01-07). "HTC announces new Vive Pro Eye virtual reality headset with native eye tracking". https://www.theverge.com/2019/1/7/18172700/htc-vive-pro-eye-tracking-virtual-reality-headset-features-pricing-release-date-ces-2019. 
  17. ↑ Meng, Xiaoxu; Du, Ruofei; Zwicker, Matthias; Varshney, Amitabh (2018-07-01), "Kernel Foveated Rendering", Proceedings of the ACM on Computer Graphics and Interactive Techniques 1: 1–20, doi:10.1145/3203199, https://dl.acm.org/citation.cfm?id=3203199, retrieved 2018-07-01 
  18. ↑ Bezmalinovic, Tomislav (2022-10-02). "Meta Quest Pro's eye tracking improves image quality" (in en-US). https://mixed-news.com/en/meta-quest-pros-eye-tracking-improves-image-quality/. 
  19. ↑ Stein, Scott (16 September 2022). "PlayStation VR 2 Hands-On: Sony's Upcoming PS5 VR Headset Wowed Me". Red Ventures. https://www.cnet.com/tech/gaming/psvr-2-hands-on-why-the-upcoming-ps5-vr-headset-wowed-us/. 
  20. ↑ Wiggers, Kyle (June 5, 2023). "visionOS is Apple's latest operating system" (in en-US). https://techcrunch.com/2023/06/05/visionos-is-apples-latest-operating-system. 
  21. ↑ "WWDC 2023 Biggest Reveals: Vision Pro Headset, iOS 17, MacBook Air and More" (in en). https://www.cnet.com/tech/mobile/wwdc-2023-biggest-reveals-vision-pro-headset-ios-17-macbook-air-and-more. 
  22. ↑ Hamilton, Ian; Heaney, David (2025-11-12). "Steam Frame Hands-On: UploadVR's Impressions Of Valve's New Headset" (in en). https://www.uploadvr.com/valve-steam-frame-hands-on-impressions/. 
  23. ↑ "I tried to trick the Steam Frame's clever eye tracking and failed, miserably" (in en). PC Gamer. 2025-11-12. https://www.pcgamer.com/hardware/vr-hardware/foveated-streaming-genius-tech/. 



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