Oculus Reveals Asynchronous Spacewarp, Lowers VR Minimum Spec

[kcarbotte]

The big news from Oculus at OC3 isn’t the launch date and price for Touch. The biggest bombshell of the event is Asynchronous Spacewarp, which lowers the bar for VR-ready PCs to a range anyone can afford.

Oculus Reveals Asynchronous Spacewarp, Lowers VR Minimum Spec : Read more

 

[Joao_Pedro]

Was Oculus or AMD who invented it? From the video it seems to be AMD!!

 

[WFang]

Does anyone know how Oculus obtains position information vs how Vive does it?
From the article: " and it adds a synthetic frame between every other frame to free up system bandwidth for the position calculation" which the way it is written implies that a lot of heavy lifting calculations are done on the host CPU?

For Vive, my (very possibly wrong) understanding is that the controllers and headset (tracked objects) have custom ASICs that do all the positional calculations in the device and only feed a constant stream of positional data to the host computer, at up to 1000Hz? (one source: http://doc-ok.org/?p=1478)
[strike]
If my understanding of both systems is sufficiently accurate, it seems to me that would imply that Vive has the edge for fluid and highly responsive positional tracking with less loading of the host system?[/strike]

Edit: further reading makes it clear that things are much more complicated, though I still wonder in principal which system has the higher host load for processing related to the positioning algorithms.

 

[Specter0420]

Or you could go the other route and get a OSVR HDK2 for $350 and build a $1000 gaming PC with some motion controllers (Move, Wii, leapmotion, etc.) The HDK has the same screen resolution and size compared to the CV1 and Vive but it is a full RGB panel, so 50% more subpixels and much better text readability.

 

[kcarbotte]

Was Oculus or AMD who invented it? From the video it seems to be AMD!!

The keynote speech at Oculus Connect 3 made it seem like Oculus came up with it, AMD and Nvidia helped make it work.

 

[Sakkura]

Was Oculus or AMD who invented it? From the video it seems to be AMD!!

Oculus is technically the inventor of ASW, but it required a lot of work on the driver side from AMD and Nvidia. Basically all three deserve credit for it.

 

[Sakkura]

Does anyone know how Oculus obtains position information vs how Vive does it?
From the article: " and it adds a synthetic frame between every other frame to free up system bandwidth for the position calculation" which the way it is written implies that a lot of heavy lifting calculations are done on the host CPU?

For Vive, my (very possibly wrong) understanding is that the controllers and headset (tracked objects) have custom ASICs that do all the positional calculations in the device and only feed a constant stream of positional data to the host computer, at up to 1000Hz? (one source: http://doc-ok.org/?p=1478)
[strike]
If my understanding of both systems is sufficiently accurate, it seems to me that would imply that Vive has the edge for fluid and highly responsive positional tracking with less loading of the host system?[/strike]

Edit: further reading makes it clear that things are much more complicated, though I still wonder in principal which system has the higher host load for processing related to the positioning algorithms.

The CPU load of the Oculus Constellation tracking system is greater than the load of the Vive's Lighthouse tracking system. But it's still pretty negligible for a gaming PC. Even with 4 cameras (the maximum supported in the SDK at this point) and Touch controllers, it's only a couple percent CPU load.

It's technically an advantage for the Vive, but in practice pretty negligible. I think a potentially more important benefit of the Lighthouse tracking system is that there are no wires between the base stations and the PC. That means backpack PCs can deliver untethered VR with the current tracking system. That's not possible with the current Oculus Constellation system, because you'd still have wires running to the cameras.

 

[bigpinkdragon286]

Video is marked private.

 

[bit_user]

Ever since I first read about ATW, I keep thinking about similarities with MS Talisman (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Microsoft_Talisman).

 

[manu_9]

Having AMD involved, I'd bet Sony engineers are also looking at this for PSVR.

 

[Sakkura]

Having AMD involved, I'd bet Sony engineers are also looking at this for PSVR.

That's quite likely. Valve has also had an eye on it, and have recently put their version of ATW (the older version of spacewarp) in beta. Oddly enough it doesn't support AMD hardware yet, though ATW has been working on AMD cards all along with the Rift.