Apple wins a Patent for a Predictive, Foveated VR Headset
Today the U.S. Patent and Trademark Office officially published a series of 63 newly granted patents for Apple Inc. today and one of them is titled "Predictive, foveated virtual reality system." The invention is designed to ease eye strain associated with viewing VR imagery like games for long periods of time.
Many conventional virtual reality and augmented reality systems on the market today may suffer from latency problems potentially cause eyestrain, headaches, and/or nausea.
Additionally, the amount of image data required to be captured, generated and/or displayed to the user of a conventional virtual reality system may be so large as to affect the performance of the system (e.g., increased latency) and to increase the cost and/or size of the system.
Apple's granted patent covers methods and systems for a virtual reality (VR) and/or augmented reality (AR) device (e.g., a headset, or head mounted, device) may include a predictive, foveated virtual reality system.
A predictive foveated virtual reality system may also be configured to capture (and render) image data using more than one resolution, such as to possibly reduce overall overhead, cost, workload.
Additionally, a virtual reality system may be configured anticipate a user's movements, such as to look ahead, in order to capture image data, as well as prepare the image data for display, for a predictive, future line of sight, according to some embodiments.
See the full story here: https://www.patentlyapple.com/patently-apple/2019/06/apple-wins-a-patent-for-a-predictive-foveated-vr-headset.html