Could This Technology Be a Breakthrough in Virtual Reality?

Though VR and AR technology is booming at rapid pace but challenges still remain. Creating advanced and better graphics cards have somehow resolved lot of issues but the real VR and AR experience will take a bit of time to be fully realized, but that undoubtedly it would have a heavy usage along the way.
One major issue that needs to be worked upon is the resolution. There is a limitation of processing power in case of mobile VRs, the requirements that need to be addressed are high resolution display panels and demands of low latency. With the current resolution for instance with QHD (2560 x 1440) resolution or the Rift headset’s 1080×1200 resolution the eye would probably have been a little unpressed by the clarity of an image. Also due to closeness of screen to our eye, the images details appear rough and jagged while moving it.

VR headset with Human Eye Resolution

There are dozens of VR headsets out there including 4K and 8K VR headsets. These headsets have multiple times higher resolution than Rift and Gear VR. Recently there’s a Finnish company called Varjo that has emerged from stealth mode offering seventy times higher resolution than promised by HTC, Oculus.

Varjo has unveiled a new type of VR and AR headset code named "20/20". 20/20 means near to perfect vision and that is what Varjo is trying to aim at. The company says it is using a patent technology that tries to create a replica of how the human eye works and thus creating a high resolution image.

The seventy million pixel per eye display depends on the technology that tracks the human eye through a technique called “Foveated eye tracking”.

Foveated rendering is an upcoming Video game 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) Ref

Varjo has not yet revealed as to how it exactly works in their hardware, but the crux of the technology is ultra high rendering where the eye is focusing at some point, and lower resolution rendering when it isn't the focal point of an eye.

The company has plans to ship it's products, specifically for professional users and applications starting in late 2017.

You can see the comparison images below: Images taken from Varjo

Here is the promo video

Conclusion

Varjo claims it's patent technology will surpass the current VR state of the art tech by ten years but there are a lot of unanswered questions like the latency, frame rate and how they plan to display content at such a high resolution. We will most probably get the answers by end of this year. Stay tuned for more updates.