Research into foveated rendering dates back at least to 1991.[5]
At Tech Crunch Disrupt SF 2014,Fove unveiled a headset featuring foveated rendering.[6] This was followed by a successful kickstarter in May 2015.[7]
AtCES 2016,SensoMotoric Instruments (SMI) demoed a new 250 Hz eye tracking system and a working foveated rendering solution. It resulted from a partnership with camera sensor manufacturerOmnivision who provided the camera hardware for the new system.[8][9]
In July 2016,Nvidia demonstrated duringSIGGRAPH a new method of foveated rendering claimed to be invisible to users.[1][10]
In February 2017, Qualcomm announced their Snapdragon 835 Virtual Reality Development Kit (VRDK) which includes foveated rendering support called Adreno Foveation.[11][12]
According to chief scientistMichael Abrash atOculus, utilising foveated rendering in conjunction withsparse rendering anddeep learning image reconstruction has the potential to require an order of magnitude fewer pixels to be rendered in comparison to a full image.[13] Later, these results have been demonstrated and published.[14]
In 2025,Valve announced the upcomingSteam Frame headset, which applies a variation of the technique known as "foveated streaming" for wireless streaming from a PC to the headset; the method similarly uses variants inbit rate, and is performed at theencoder level rather than the software level.[22][23]
^Meng, Xiaoxu; Du, Ruofei; Zwicker, Matthias; Varshney, Amitabh (2018-07-01),"Kernel Foveated Rendering",Proceedings of the ACM on Computer Graphics and Interactive Techniques,1:1–20,doi:10.1145/3203199,S2CID4899582, retrieved2018-07-01
