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by evolvingstuff 5237 days ago
One way the circumvent the need for 5000 teraflops mentioned in the article is to exploit the fact that our eye is only capable of seeing a relatively small area in great detail at any given instant. Per viewer, we only need to finely render a tiny bit of the scene. This of course precludes the same level of realism on a shared screen, but I suspect that viewer-specific devices (e.g. http://www.scientificamerican.com/article.cfm?id=virtual-rea... ) will become the norm as we move further towards virtual reality.
1 comments
Someone 5237 days ago
I doubt that would work. A system like that would have to be able to predict where saccadic land. Otherwise, you would, for a short time after every saccade, look at a part of the screen that is low in detail. Short saccades take about 20ms. So, if the graphics pipeline has higher latency, it would mean that we would have to be able to predict saccades.

I am not familiar Witt the date of the art here, but I do not think that is possible.

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soup10 5237 days ago
Just 60 FPS = 17ms per frame. Theres lag with the display response, graphics pipeline, and detecting eye movements, but it doesn't seem unreasonable for future tech.
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evolvingstuff 5237 days ago
Agreed. To elaborate:

Saccades to an unexpected stimulus normally take about 200 milliseconds (ms) to initiate, and then last from about 20–200 ms, depending on their amplitude (20–30 ms is typical in language reading).

Saccades of 20ms in duration are ones that are very near to the current center of focus (e.g. moving to the next chunk of letters while reading the words of this sentence). This just means that detailed rendering needs to extend to a slightly larger radius, but this is still significantly cheaper to render than an field of view. For larger jumps there is ~200ms during which the computer can attempt to predict the final destination of the saccade, and thus begin to do some preemptive computations. Once the saccade lands at the new location, assuming a rendering speed of 100fps, there would be at most 10ms before the high-res version kicked in, but again, with some degree of preemptive/predictive computation, perhaps a slightly better version could be available immediately.

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