Nvidia Advancements: Dynamic Focus & Prescription Lenses for AR Displays
The research team from Nvidia is returning to SIGGRAPH, an annual hotbed of innovation, with two new advancements in augmented reality displays.
The first breakthrough, Foveated AR, is a prototype head-mounted display that uses an eye-tracking method for dynamic focus while delivering foveated rendering.
Foveated rendering is a technique that tracks the eye’s focus in order to display high-resolution content within the eye’s perceptible field of view and lower-resolution content in the periphery, which, in turn, reduces the data footprint of graphic rendering.
In Foveated AR, Nvidia pairs a concave half-mirrored display in the foveal area (where vision is sharpest) and a wide field of view display for the peripheral area. A mechanical system moves a holographic optical element horizontally within the system to match the pupil’s position. The optical elements are also implemented in the eye-tracking system, with the eye’s position illuminated by infrared LEDs and reflected via the half-mirror display to the…
