FlashBack: Immersive Virtual Reality on Mobile Devices

While VR brings with it the promise of boundless immersive experiences, it does look like it currently requires a technological powerhouse in order to run it. One only has to take a quick look at the plethora of VR-ready badges and certificates that have surfaced over the past few months to realise just how true that is. That’s not news, and was something we in the industry expected from the get-go.

Given that there’s so much focus on this imbalance between the growing industry excitement and high bar of entry, it’s no surprise that there are quite a few companies out there trying to bridge the gap between what’s possible on your HMD’s and your cheaper cardboard-based devices such as Google Cardboard and Samsung GearVR.

We have previously covered brands such as VRridge and Trinus also pitching in with their individual takes on how to sidestep the expensive hardware. Our covering of these can be found in our article: “VRidge: Streaming PC-Based VR Games To Your Phone And Cardboard”.

Flashback

Flashback is the name of a recently published (and recently removed) research paper published by Kevin Boos from Rice University as well as a dynamic duo from the Microsoft Research team: Eduardo Cuervo and David Chu. Apparently, the Flashback technology they have been working on together (With Kevin as a research intern) would be able to pre-build your virtual experiences beforehand, which might completely remove the need for an expensive piece of gaming hardware.

The following is a snippet from the 13-page research paper:

“FLASHBACK is an unorthodox design point for HMD VR that eschews all real-time scene rendering. Instead, FLASHBACK aggressively precomputes and caches all possible images that a VR user might encounter. FLASHBACK memoizes costly rendering effort in an offline step to build a cache full of panoramic images. During runtime, FLASHBACK constructs and maintains a hierarchical storage cache index to quickly lookup images that the user should be seeing. On a cache miss, FLASHBACK uses fast approximations of the correct image while concurrently fetching more closely-matching entries from its cache for future requests. Moreover, FLASHBACK not only works for static scenes, but also for dynamic scenes with moving and animated objects.”

At the moment, Microsoft Flashback is just a prototype, but once it goes live it’s new algorithmic approach might deliver high-quality virtual environments on low-end smartphones and PCs, which sigificantly helps us carve our way towards making Virtual Reality a consumer reality.

2016 WordPress Site of the Year Award

In other (less significant) news, we recently got nominated for, and actually won the annual Danish 2016 WordPress Site of the Year Award. While this may seem like a small victory compared to the grand scheme of the industry we’re reporting on, we still think it’s pretty exciting.