20 megapixels VR oh.. that is going to be true in future. On Display Week in Los Angeles, Google’s Virtual Reality CEO Clay Bavor talks about future displays for VR glasses. He announces that the future shows would have ten times higher resolution than current devices with 20 megapixels VR. The depth of the rendering compensates by eye tracking systems.
According to Bavor, Google is working on 20 megapixels VR display “intensively” with a leading OLED manufacturer on new, especially high-resolution displays for virtual reality glasses. These should offer up to 20 megapixels per eye. So that is approximately 2.5 times the number of pixels of a 4K TV. With which producer Google cooperates, Bavor does not say.
He states that he has already tested the new screens in the laboratory and describes them as “spectacular.” Nevertheless, the “final display” would need more pixels. Also although the new screens with 20 megapixels VR would have “much, much more pixels” than today’s VR displays.
However, the huge pixel quantity creates a new problem. “We can not only render, but not even transfer so much data,” says Bavor. According to Google’s VR chief, this would require a transmission speed of 100 gigabits per second.
Bavor, therefore, hopes for the eye-tracking technology. In particular, the rendering method is known as “foveated rendering.” The computer detects where the user is looking and only calculates this small section with maximum resolution.
The periphery is low-resolution without the VR-spectacle carrier being noticeable. So this massively reduces the amount of data to be transferred and the required computing power.
20 megapixels VR displays are a problem of many
So that is the combination of extremely high-resolution displays with eye tracking. And the new rendering process is “one of the ways to significantly improve the visual quality and credibility of VR experiences.”
Displays are one of the “endless unsolvable problems” for Virtual Reality. More high-resolution displays are necessary to improve the sharpness and range of vision. And thus the quality of VR experience fundamentally.
The resolution and field of view of current VR glasses corresponded to a real vision of 20 percent. That is considered blind in most US states, according to Bavor.