Back in late 2016 Oculus announced a new technology that was designed to help reduce the system hardware requirements for virtual reality (VR) experiences while maintain content quality across a wider array of hardware. The technology was titled Asynchronous Spacewarp (ASW) and uses frame-rate smoothing techniques to almost halve the computer processing unit (CPU) and graphic processing unit (GPU) time required to produce nearly the same output from the same content. Now a new version of ASW is on the way and with it the increased performance that technology provides will be expanded on further.
Look out for ASW 2.0 soon coming to an @Oculus Rift near you where we combine PTW with ASW. For more info we'll post our Rift PC SDK talk at #OC5 soon.
— Volga Aksoy (@volgaksoy) September 27, 2018
The news came from the recent Oculus Connect 5 event which features numerous announcements including the new Oculus Quest standalone head-mounted display (HMD). The newly announced ASW 2.0 however is equally as exciting thanks to the improvements it will bring to the experiences users will be able to enjoy.
One of the first big improvements for the technology is that it will be combined with Oculus’ Positional Timewarp (PTW) system to see the HMD motion correction to be handled by PTW rather than ASW. This combination of the two technologies will also see a number of benefits on both sides including leveraging PTW’s timing-free corrections and offering better activation and deactivation of ASW.
Thanks to both PTW and ASW working together, the new 2.0 version will be able to provide noticeable improvements to experiences that will result in less artefacting and stress on the hardware. The technology is also going to be better able to handle depth within titles and will enable more immersive results when users look around a scene and focus on objects at different distances. Again, the results will be more notable by users as they move around while developers will find it easier then before to manage and handle the technologies and the required processing power of their applications.
You can see the section from the Oculus Connect 5 PC SDK keynote that talks about ASW 2.0 in the below video at around the 31 minute mark.
VRFocus will be sure to bring you all the latest on this new version of the technology in the future, along with other updates to the Oculus Rift PC SDK so stay tuned for more.
via Mint VR