Oculus has announced the launch of the biggest update to its mobile platform to date, which means having remade the entire Home from scratch to offer a higher image quality.
With Samsung’s presentation this afternoon, Oculus has announced the arrival of several new features to the mobile virtual reality of Gear VR, but there is one that despite having already commented on the previous news, it is worth highlighting because in the words of Oculus it is the biggest update of its mobile platform to date. This novelty is the reconstruction of Oculus Home from scratch, managing to reduce loading times up to three times and much more importantly improving the sharpness of the image in mobile virtual reality, thanks to having doubled the pixel resolution in Home. “Think of it as jumping from standard definition to high definition,” says Oculus CTO John Carmack.
As UploadVR shared in an interview with Max Cohen, head of mobile product at Oculus, before the software update, “the eye buffers rendered at 1024×1024 and the way it was rendered on the screen, you were looking at something on the order of 400 pixels vertically,” and with the new update it will be like moving to 600 pixels. “So it’s about 1.5 times more, which is about two in general.” All this thanks to rewriting the code commissioned with cylindrical layers, a technique carried out by Carmack, with which the mobile image is formed in a slightly different way and manages to use the screen pixels better.
In the words of UploadVR, they were impressed with the improvement, stating that it is the best they have seen in any virtual reality viewer to date. Something that allows you to read the texts with total clarity and achieves an image sharpness never seen before, as they indicate. At the moment, we have not been able to test the update since it seems not to be available yet, although according to Oculus it is already being distributed. This Carmack technique is only being used at Home at the moment, but according to them, it is a matter of time before it reaches other experiences and viewers.
