The team behind FOVE, the premier eye-tracking VR headset launched on Kickstarter, recently released a showing some pretty spectacular applications for the device, namely foveated rendering and real-time depth-of-field.
If you’ve been following the development of FOVE, you’re probably already aware of one of the most important implications eye-tracking brings to virtual reality: foveated rendering, a technique that allows developers to reduce the overall number of pixels rendered outside of where your eye is actually looking, thereby saving all important processing power.
The video shows both this and real-time depth-of-field – a technique that creates photographic effects to simulate focal cues. While not perfectly suited to the anatomical structure of the eye, which can do something called ‘accommodation’ – or a ability to change the optical power in the eye’s lens through muscle constriction – the results are really useful for making a scene feel more real.
