Asynchronous spacewarp: is it reality, or something that Captain Kirk yells as the USS Enterprise is about to engage its warp drive?
Actuality, it's virtual reality—a new processing technique that Oculus launched this week. First announced last month at the company's developer conference, it promises to cut the processing power needed to render VR content in half.
ASW is remarkably simple at its core: if it detects that the system is about to drop a frame, it will insert a copy of the previous frame into the void, ensuring that the viewer doesn't experience any flickering or tearing.
While the technology could one day be used in the sort of standalone VR headsets that Oculus, Intel, and ARM are working on, its chief benefit today is to reduce the hardware requirements for PCs that power the current generation of headsets, like the Oculus Rift. Minimum specs now include an Nvidia GeForce GTX 960, an Intel Core i3-6100, and 8GB of RAM.
The hope is that by supporting these lower-end specs, ASW will make VR headsets more appealing to non-gamers who don't own or don't want to shell out a lot of money for expensive PCs. CyberPower is even advertising a $499 AMD-powered desktop, and offering it as a bundle with the Rift headset for $999, which is $100 cheaper than buying both separately. The PC includes a Radeon RX 470 graphics card and an AMD FX 4350 processor.
As for ASW's limitations, there's "no completely free lunch, however," Oculus warned in a blog post. "ASW doesn't scale well below half the display's refresh rate. Depending on what's being displayed, there may be visual artifacts present as a result of imperfect extrapolation."
That could result in several annoyances, including rapid brightness changes and some objects that move too quickly for ASW to render properly.