Panel Discussion: Foveated Rendering and Its Future (SIGGRAPH 2019)
Posted Oct 5, 2019, 7:41 PM UTC
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At SIGGRAPH 2019, Tobii talked to a panel of industry experts from HTC, NVIDIA, and ReinVR on foveated rendering, which enables immersive VR experience and leads to achieving outstanding computational efficiency. Watch to learn about how they went about defining, designing and implementing foveated rendering and how this immersive experience will impact VR and open up a wide range of market opportunities.
Find out more at foveatedrendering.com
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No time to watch now, but does the group echo or dispute
Abrash'sCarmack's statement that foveated rendering creates such distracting - and hard to remove - peripheral vision artifacts that it just hasn't produced the results they need?Edit: looked up the quote and saw it was Carmack who said it. Reference in his keynote is here.
I haven't seen Abrash's OC6 keynote, but I can't imagine Abrash saying that foveated rendering in general, because it's nonsensical. I can't see him saying a specific implementations, such as the AI approaches they've been trying, have artifacts, but it makes no sense as a generalization.
My mistake, it was Carmack who said it.
https://youtu.be/PMIDaomx0GA?t=5415
As I suspected, he's talking about their current implementation, not foveated rendering in general.
Right - I didn't mean to imply that he said all foveated rendering results in artifacts or is a non-starter. However, it's a good signal that it's not as easy to get the big gains some people hope for.
I'm sure FRL has viewed nearly every alternative out there today, and if none actually meet their quality bar (yet) then I wonder if their bar is too high, if others' bars are too low, or if it's something else.
That's why I asked my original question - is the topic of quality vs. compression discussed at all, and do they consider acceptable quality a solved problem?
ahhh ok well we need to note what he's talking about vs. others.
He's talking about mobile hardware, "slam dunk perfect foveated rendering" on mobile first and the same for PC second AND using their own implementation.
the others were talking about an already working real world solution. Two very different things.
But as i previously said no one has mentioned a baseline peripheral pixels per degree. Tobii had already shown off a foveated rendering series of demos and people couldn't really tell the difference between off and on. Actually people were falesly reporting that they weren't showing off foveated rendering and it was later that other testers asked and were allowed to turn off and on to compare.
To me it sounds like they have an idea of baseline periph res while Oculus has no clue. And Oculus quite doesn't understand foveated rendering thoroughly including limitations despite having C & A onboard.
That's sort of the nature of my question. There seem to be two different opinions: this is a solved problem available today (Tobii eye tracking with Nvidia foveated rendering), or - per Carmack's comment - lots more work is needed to get high compression without distracting artifacts.
I didn't know if the panel addressed this head on. For example: "we disagree with Carmack. Our testing shows 6x compression without the user noticing a change." Sounds like they don't discuss it though.
Can you explain better what you are talking about? As I understand, the current implementations of foveated rendering working on Tobii and other eye trackers do not net us near the desired 95% processing cost reduction, and as such, may not really be too worthwhile for a consumer headset just yet with the trade-offs we'd need to take. Both the peripheral resolution and the size of the regions cannot follow the exact theoretical efficiencies of the human eye currently. So one would think that Carmack is in fact talking about current implementations both in and out of their labs, since error cannot be eliminated so easily when attempting to render at such levels at to be close to the performance gains theoretically possible. And then I'm not sure what you mean about "an idea of baseline periph res", because it seems rather odd to me to question whether one has knowledge about the abilities of the human eye which have been relatively well studied already, rather than knowledge about novel methods of eye tracking and foveated rendering of which there is likely a lot more to be done. Or perhaps you mean "baseline" as in an acceptable value so that we get enough performance gains but no noticeable error, in which case, the baseline for Tobii is naturally not the same as what Oculus or even different individuals within Oculus are going to want (as usual, because there is almost always going to be differences in opinion within their teams as we've seen before). For Carmack, that baseline is likely much more stringent, as he is viewing this as a set of trade-offs to be put into an inexpensive consumer product.
When did Abrash say that?
Sorry, it wasn't Abrash but Carmack. The actual quote is here:
https://youtu.be/PMIDaomx0GA?t=5415
Got ya, thanks.
I didn’t watch whole video yet, but I recall a bit about not rendering too low resolution in peripheral to avoid pops or popping or something like that. They didn’t say what would be too low though. But this could just be the implementation using Nvidia VRS that they did and other solutions may deal with low resolution artifacts like the contrast preserving stuff Nvidia experimented with.
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