The problem of mobile virtual reality is that smartphones or any other mobile iron, due to low power, just not able to provide detailed and realistic 3D graphics. This problem is particularly acute now, when a major player like Google, introduced their new VR platform Daydream. How to provide realistic picture with a relatively weak iron? It turned out that it is quite possible. During the second day of the event Google I/O 2017, the company announced an innovative system of graphical rendering of Seurat.
Named after the French painter Georges-Pierre Seurat, this unique system allows developers of games and VR apps to bring on the screens of VR headsets to the schedule previously unattainable quality. During the presentation, the audience the audience was shown a demo video, created by the specialists of the laboratory ILMxLAB owned by the famous Studio LucasFilm. The scene was a journey, from the first person at the military base of the Imperial army from the movie Rogue One: A Star Wars Story. Seurat with the help of special algorithms reduces the size used in the scene textures 300 times, and the number of polygons in 1000 times.
“The essence of this system is simple. You define a space within which the user can move and look around. You also set some parameters like number of polygons. After that Seurat does the rest for you. The system creates many images in this confined space, and automatically generate them from the 3D scene, which looks identical to the original, but at the same time it is very much simplified,” explains project Manager Andrew Daydream Doronichev.
Of course, if you look at both scenes and compare what is out in the smallest detail, you will immediately see the difference: on a powerful PC, the graphics quality will be much higher than that. However, the Seurat, it is still just a great result for mobile iron. Realistic reflections in real-time, high-quality lighting – it all looks incredible. Releasing this tool and handing it into the hands of developers, Google hopes soon to see a sharp increase in high-quality VR content.
Google Seurat – a revolutionary graphics rendering for mobile VR
Sergey Grey