Facebook is releasing public code and formally open sourcing its DeepFocus research into ultra-realistic visuals for VR headsets.
The DeepFocus approach to rendering visuals would produce “natural blur” by way of a neural network architecture that maintains “the ultrasharp image resolutions necessary for high-quality VR,” according to the company. Facebook Reality Labs is the new name for Facebook’s Oculus research teams working on VR and AR concepts that could take years to realize commercially. One such project related to DeepFocus was revealed earlier this year — the Half Dome varifocal hardware prototype which physically moves the panels of a VR headset to produce visuals that would seem to solve the “vergence-accommodation conflict” which plagues current designs. This “conflict” is between where the eyes are pointed and where the lenses of the eyeballs are focused and it can limit the amount of time some people can wear a VR headset without feeling some kind of discomfort.
At the Oculus developer conference in September, Facebook Reality Labs Chief Scientist Michael Abrash talked a bit about some of these research efforts.
A research paper presented at SIGGRAPH Asia this month details the DeepFocus approach and explains how it can be applied not only to a varifocal architecture like Half Dome, but it also “supports high-quality image synthesis for multifocal and light-field displays.”
“We’re currently using DeepFocus with Half Dome, but the deep learning approach to defocusing is hardware agnostic,” Oculus explained. “We’re excited to make the source and training data available for engineers developing new VR systems, vision scientists, and other researchers studying perception.”
Half Dome is one of the most interesting hardware projects Facebook’s research teams revealed publicly. Unfortunately, though, the effort didn’t make an appearance at Oculus Connect 5 in September with co-founder Brendan Iribe’s exit from the company revealed just a few weeks later. Amid a report his departure was related to the future direction of PC-based headsets, we wondered if the open sourcing of this related project might indicate Facebook ceased its research into Half Dome.
According to the lead researcher on the DeepFocus project research is continuing with Half Dome and DeepFocus, and this open sourcing effort is intended to “accelerate development in this area to benefit the industry as a whole.”
“Facebook Reality Lab is pursuing many ‘feature prototypes’ to explore the potential future for VR immersion – Half Dome is one of those,” the researcher explained. “The Display Systems Research (DSR) team at FRL continues to develop advanced display technologies, including DeepFocus, to explore the visual frontier of VR/AR. Half Dome and many other feature prototypes are constantly under development at FRL.
Tagged with: facebook, Faceboook Reality Labs, Varifocal
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