You might be thinking that with its recent focus on augmented reality and holograms, Microsoft wouldn’t have much interest in VR. But you’d be very wrong as the company’s research arm showed today when it unveiled the Irides project.

According to Microsoft, the fundamental challenge of virtual reality head-mounted displays (HMDs), like the Oculus Rift, or Sony’s Morpheus, is offering high quality, responsiveness and mobility, all at the same time. And so far, they all fail at this – or at least that’s the company’s argument.

Enter Project Irides, which is designed to test some of Microsoft’s technologies and see whether VR HMDs could be significantly improved. Irides uses the Kahawai technology, which we’ve detailed a couple of days ago. In a nutshell, Kahawai offloads some of the GPU rendering to the cloud and then streams it back to the headset with higher quality graphics.

But Irides goes beyond that. By leveraging, or rather pushing Kahawai’s technology to its limits, it takes advantage of super low-latency and low-bandwidth, as well as predictive graphical processing to offer a superior mobile experience on virtual reality headsets.

Irides also does this with a technique called “likelyhood-based foveation” that renders higher quality parts of an image and ‘gracefully degrades’ others, all based on where the user is likely to look. It also uses a spherical mesh for said image. In a sense, this sort of mimics the human eye, and offers the user lower latency and higher quality at the same time.

Read More at Original Source: http://www.neowin.net/news/irides-microsofts-project-to-create-a-better-virtual-reality-headset

Fix responsiveness, by introducing internet lag with cloud computing, Strong argument that one.

Well played.

" In a nutshell, Kahawai offloads some of the GPU rendering to the cloud and then streams it back to the headset with higher quality graphics."

Interesting way of implementing the technology. I'm excited to see how it works. I like that the image goes all the way across and mimics the human eye.
In visual processing, the human eye sees color in the front, but is less keen on movement, while the sides of the eye see in mostly grayscale but pick up movement much more easily.

Yes i read it, adding upload and download to a server into the equation will not improve resposiveness. 

"Irides was tested out with the help of Doom 3 and its speedy gameplay. According to the company, participants came away impressed and mentioned a noticeable difference both in quality, latency and overall experience when these techniques were used to render the game in VR."

This tech IMPROVES latency.. so yes..    

That isnt how that works. Yes your internet is a factor, but doesnt mean you will have response problems.  Speaking from someone who has played Cloud Gaming through Nvidia Grid this shouldnt be an issue

Everytime Microsoft advertise something with their new tech, it's always Tech based technology! for 2 fucking years i've been listening to this shit over and over again and it's really, really getting boring. No offense to the messenger

When they use peoples opinions instead of facts, (responce is easily measurable), ill take it with a grain of salt. 

Again with cloud, will it work before this gen ends?