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by SeanaldMcDnld 321 days ago
Consistent output and spatial coherence across each eye, maybe a couple years? But meeting head tracking accuracy and latency requirements, I’d bet decades. There’s no way any of this tech reduces end to end latency to acceptable levels, without a massive change in hardware. We’ll probably see someone use reprojection techniques in a year or so and claim they’ve done it. But true generated pixels straight to the headset based on head tracking, is so so far away.
3 comments

You don't have to do it in real time, per se. I imagine a world in which the renderer and the world generation are decoupled. For example, you could descriptively articulate what you wanted to achieve and have it generate a world, quietly do some structure from motion (or just generate the models and textures), and those those as assets in a game engine for the actual moment to moment rendering.

You'd have some "please wait in this lobby space while we generate the universe" moments, but those are easy to hide with clever design.

I think your timeline is off, at least for a tech demo.

This model already runs at 24fps, and I bet could be made to run at >75fps by scaling hardware and distilling/quantizing the model to only work on certain environments.

The two eye problem seems pretty trivial to me: add another image decoding head with the sole task of decoding the other eye. Training data for this can be plentifully gathered through simulated 3D data, or running existing 2D data (e.g. youtube videos) through slow mono to stereo models. This should add minimal latency as it's another head vs. subsequent layers.

If you can train the model to allow WASD movement + mouse, head tracking is not very different. I think with enough effort we could probably build a VR experience using this today. Getting it onto affordable hardware could be a totally different story, but certainly not decades.

Maybe I'm missing something though!

Agree. So I'll make a wild bet of "20 years". And hope for the best.