Foveated rendering

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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

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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

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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 variants in bit rate, and is performed at the encoder level rather than the software level.[22][23]

See also

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References

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  1. ^ a b Parrish, Kevin (2016-07-22). "Nvidia plans to prove that new method improves image quality in virtual reality". Digital Trends. Retrieved 2017-02-02.
  2. ^ "Understanding Foveated Rendering". Sensics. 2016-04-11. Archived from the original on 2017-12-01. Retrieved 2017-02-04.
  3. ^ Carbotte, Kevin (30 March 2018). "What Is Fixed Foveated Rendering, And Why Does It Matter?". Tom's Hardware. Retrieved 9 September 2019.
  4. ^ Orland, Kyle (21 March 2016). "How Valve got passable VR running on a four-year-old graphics card". Ars Technica. Retrieved 9 September 2019.
  5. ^ Wang, Lili; Shi, Xuehuai; Liu, Yi (2023). "Foveated rendering: A state-of-the-art survey". Computational Visual Media. 9 (2): 195–228. arXiv:2211.07969. doi:10.1007/s41095-022-0306-4. S2CID 253523241.
  6. ^ "FOVE Uses Eye Tracking To Make Virtual Reality More Immersive". TechCrunch. 10 September 2014. Retrieved 2019-02-06.
  7. ^ "FOVE: The World's First Eye Tracking Virtual Reality Headset". Kickstarter. 20 January 2017. Retrieved 2019-02-06.
  8. ^ Mason, Will (2016-01-15). "SMI's 250Hz Eye Tracking and Foveated Rendering Are For Real, and the Cost May Surprise You". UploadVR. Retrieved 2017-02-02.
  9. ^ Mason, Will (2016-01-15). "SMI's 250Hz Eye Tracking and Foveated Rendering Are For Real, and the Cost May Surprise You". UploadVR. Retrieved 2020-06-18.
  10. ^ "NVIDIA Partners with SMI on Innovative Rendering Technique That Improves VR". Nvidia. 2016-01-21. Retrieved 2017-02-02.
  11. ^ "Qualcomm Introduces Snapdragon 835 Virtual Reality Development Kit". Qualcomm. 2017-02-23. Retrieved 2021-06-01.
  12. ^ "Foveation in Game Engines". vr.tobii.com. Retrieved 2021-06-01.
  13. ^ Oculus (2018-09-26), Oculus Connect 5 | Keynote Day 01, retrieved 2018-09-30
  14. ^ Kaplanyan, Anton (2020-05-15). "DeepFovea: AR/VR rendering, inspired by human vision". YouTube. Retrieved 2020-05-15.
  15. ^ "Oculus Quest gets dynamic fixed foveated rendering". VentureBeat. 2019-12-22. Retrieved 2020-01-21.
  16. ^ Statt, Nick (2019-01-07). "HTC announces new Vive Pro Eye virtual reality headset with native eye tracking". The Verge. Retrieved 2019-01-14.
  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, S2CID 4899582, retrieved 2018-07-01
  18. ^ Bezmalinovic, Tomislav (2022-10-02). "Meta Quest Pro's eye tracking improves image quality". MIXED Reality News. Retrieved 2025-11-14.
  19. ^ Stein, Scott (16 September 2022). "PlayStation VR 2 Hands-On: Sony's Upcoming PS5 VR Headset Wowed Me". CNET. Red Ventures. Retrieved 5 October 2022.
  20. ^ Wiggers, Kyle (June 5, 2023). "visionOS is Apple's latest operating system". TechCrunch. Archived from the original on June 8, 2023. Retrieved June 7, 2023.
  21. ^ "WWDC 2023 Biggest Reveals: Vision Pro Headset, iOS 17, MacBook Air and More". CNET. Archived from the original on June 9, 2023. Retrieved June 7, 2023.
  22. ^ Hamilton, Ian; Heaney, David (2025-11-12). "Steam Frame Hands-On: UploadVR's Impressions Of Valve's New Headset". UploadVR. Retrieved 2025-11-12.
  23. ^ "I tried to trick the Steam Frame's clever eye tracking and failed, miserably". PC Gamer. 2025-11-12. Retrieved 2025-11-14.
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