Facebook's DeepFovea AI promises power-efficient VR foveated rendering

Foveated rendering addresses a growing challenge for VR headsets, rendering sharp details for your eye's visual sweet spot -- the fovea -- and a simpler, blurrier version for your peripheral vision. Now engineers at Facebook Reality Labs have come up with DeepFovea, an AI-assisted alternative that creates "plausible peripheral video" rather than actually rendering accurate peripheral imagery. The new process is known as "foveated reconstruction," and Facebook says it achieves more than 14 times compression on RGB video with no significant degradation in user-perceived quality. When capturing a video stream, DeepFovea samples only 10% of the pixels in each video frame, focusing largely but not exclusively on the area where the user's eye is focused, represented by the lizard head above. By comparison, the peripheral area is sampled only by scattered dots that become less dense further from the eye's focus area.