It takes quite a bit to process virtual reality, which is why headsets like the HTC Vive and Oculus Rift have such high system requirements, and why headsets like the Samsung Gear VR will only play nicely with the company’s flagship devices. So does that mean that if you own a cheap smartphone that you’ll be left out of VR?
While it might seem that way, it turns out that Microsoft Research has been working on a project called FlashBack. The goal of FlashBack is to bring VR to low-end devices, and how they plan to do that is through a simple approach: by pre-rendering the scenes beforehand, meaning that even if you have a slower processor less RAM, it won’t really matter, at least not as much as how fast your storage is.
According to Microsoft Research, FlashBack improves VR on low-end phones by as much as 8x better framerates, and 97x less energy consumed by the device. In a way it is similar to how streaming video games works, in which the processing is done somewhere else, meaning that you will be able to game on just about any device.
FlashBack will also work with dynamic scenes and animated objects by generating fast approximations of the correct image, while trying to fetch more closely-matched entries from its cache for future scenes. Unfortunately for us, FlashBack is still in its early stages of development which means that we won’t be seeing it released anytime soon, but it’s a step towards making VR more accessible to everyone. In the meantime check out the demo above to see the differences between a system running FlashBack and without.
Filed in . Read more about Microsoft and Virtual Reality (VR).