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mattnewport
Up and Coming
May 14, 2015

Hidden area stencil mesh for DK2

In his Advanced VR Rendering talk at GDC Alex Vlachos talks about a neat stencil mesh technique for reducing the number of pixels you need to render for VR. The idea is that you create a mesh that maps to the parts of the eye buffers that won't be visible on the HMD (due to the optics of the lens) and render it to the stencil buffer before you start rendering your scene and then you stencil test out all the pixels that will end up being invisible. His slides say that for the HTC Vive this cuts out 17% of your pixels. The SteamVR API will provide the right mesh for you but this would obviously be a useful optimization for the DK2 as well.

In the talk he says it should be fairly easy to work out the vert positions for this mesh but I have to admit it's not obvious to me :oops: Has anyone tried to work this out for the DK2?

    2 replies

    joan
    joan
    Up and Coming
    December 10, 2015
    Bumping this.

    Here is a link to the relevant part of the GDC talk on YouTube :
    https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=JO7G38_ ... .be&t=3447

    Has anyone tried to figure out a hidden area mask for the DK2 lately ? Are the lenses even radially symmetric ? Do we know if this has been experimented with at Oculus ? User-specific eye relief and lens type must be taken into account.
    Having a binary texture that can be tested for display pixel visibility would be interesting.

    This may or may not interfere with timewarp though.
    thewhiteambit
    Inspiring
    December 11, 2015
    Masking out areas of lower interest makes sense, but at least I would say that you see these pixels on a DK2. dOculus uses Raytracing to generate a Virtual Desktop Overlay. This makes me get rid of the black boarders and any warping of intermediate framebuffers. The result is completely filled Oculus Rift screen with widened view area and pillow edges. So to me knowing better, it sounds like BS when getting told you are technically not able to see these pixels. At least on the DK2 you are technically able to see nearly each and every pixel on the display.
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