Stanford, NVIDIA Demo More Immersive, Comfortable VR Display

VR has made big strides over the past several years. But the basic principle remains the same as when Sir Charles Wheatsone invented the first stereoscopic headset in 1838.

Sir Charles put two images of the same scene — drawn from slightly offset angles — inside a box attached to a viewer’s head. Your brain combines what each eye is seeing into something it interprets as three-dimensional.

“The only thing that’s really changed is that today we have computers,” explains NVIDIA researcher Fu-Chung Huang.

Working with the Stanford Computational Imaging Group, Huang is using GPUs to generate not two but 50 different images of the same scene many times each second. The result: a sharper, more natural VR experience.