Virtual reality is hard but becoming more and more popular. However, among the obstacles to the mass market is the fact that many people wear glasses. Such players can wear goggles with a helmet (some VR headsets are better suited for this than others) or remove goggles whenever they want to immerse themselves in virtual reality, or use eye lenses. Fortunately, the new patent shows that Sony wants to solve this problem.
The patent was filed in December 2017, published on April 4, and recently discovered by UploadVR. It describes corrective glasses that can fit into a VR headset without breaking the wearer's nose. The goggles also feature eye-tracking sensors to improve the quality of visuals on the helmet display.
The description is similar to the foveation method. This technology significantly reduces the computational load by giving priority to those areas of the image where the user's gaze is directed during rendering, and reducing the quality and resolution of the image at the periphery. The user can hardly feel the difference, and the system power requirements drop noticeably: the freed up resources can be used to increase the frame rate or to create more complex scenes. Many companies, including NVIDIA, Valve, Oculus, and Qualcomm, are developing such methods. Perhaps it is with the help of glasses that Sony is going to improve the capabilities of the PlayStation VR (PSVR) by adding foveation to its helmet.
However, the UploadVR resource suggests that Sony is going to add foveation rendering support to its platform only after 2,5 years. By then, the company will most likely have released a next-gen console rather than updating an existing PV VR helmet with corrective goggles.
However, a patent can remain just a patent, and Sony is not actually preparing anything like that. Many companies file patent applications for ideas and technologies without knowing if they will ever use them in their products. One way or another, but still I would like helmet manufacturers to really think more about users with imperfect vision.
Source: 3dnews.ru