HP Innovation Journal Issue 06: Spring 2017 | Page 9

see HMDs with resolutions of 1440x1440 per
eye, continuing to increase in upcoming years.
16K resolution is needed to get the equivalent
of watching a 4k monitor from 3 feet and ex-
perts believe as much
as 32K is needed to
reach the acuity of hu-
man vision.
Latency & Frame
Rate: In VR terminol-
ogy Motion-to-Photon
Latency is described as
the delay between the
time a person moves
their head to the time
OMEN X VR PC Pack
the new image is ren-
dered in the HMD. In
the real world we are accustomed to an instan-
taneous update, so our brain expects minimum
lag. According to industry experts such as Michael
Abrash, a maximum latency of 20 milliseconds
is necessary to prevent motion sickness in most
people, with less than 10 milliseconds highly
desirable. 90MHz is the generally accepted min-
imum frame rate.
GPU Performance: High frame, high reso-
lution experiences put heavy demands on the
system. GPU requirements will increase steeply
as resolution increases to 4K and beyond, frame
rates increase to 120Hz, rendered image com-
plexity and fill rates increase and new display
technologies such as light fields emerge.
Tracking: For a truly immersive VR expe-
rience, the headset must precisely track the
movement of a user’s head in all six degrees of
freedom, and the image must update quickly.
Hand controllers and other peripherals must be
tracked with equivalent precision.
Wireless: Today the premium PC VR experi-
ence is far superior to mobile in all respects except
one: it’s tethered, via one or more cables. The
backpack VR is an excellent solution for some
use cases, but others dictate a fully untethered
experience. We’ll soon see fully untethered wire-
less VR and the enabling technology is WiGig.
Foveated Rendering: Foveated rendering re-
lies on a simple concept of determining precisely
what a user’s eyes are looking at and rendering
only those pixels, rendering the remaining pixels
in far less detail. As a result, the GPU and display
bandwidth performance requirements drop
significantly without compromising any user ex-
perience. Foveated rendering will drive VR to new
user experience levels or drive VR more main-
stream by lowering cost of GPU requirements.
Six months ago we launched our OMEN X
VR PC Pack, which is a full power, cord-free
computer that a user can wear comfortably
while playing in the VR world. We launched
this as a developer
program, a somewhat
unique move for HP,
and sent seed units
to many customers
and developers in
both the Consumer
and Commercial mar-
kets. Giving developers
access to tomorrow’s
hardware is allowing
OMEN X VR Desktop
HP Z840 Workstation
them to start devel-
oping content today.
HP products in the VR Ecosystem
We are partnering with Microsoft to develop a
VR headset that features higher resolution than
HP’s path to enabling customers for today’s VR the best headsets on the market today and inside
began a bit over a year ago at CES 2016, when out tracking for easy setup.
we announced our partnership with HTC to deliver
One aspect of HP’s true vision of tomorrow’s
Vive-Ready PCs. With this partnership, we worked VR — imagine the combination of our VR back-
with HTC on solving two of the main pain points pack and VR headset — easy setup, high resolu-
for early VR adoption: price and setup complexity. tion, no cable ergonomics, unbounded tracking,
We identified the correct drivers, system and content that takes advantage of learnings
tweaks, and settings necessary for easy out from our developer seed program.
of the box setup of the Vive headset. Ane then
This is just is a taste of our VR work over the
worked with HTC to offer a Vive+ PC bundle for past 18 months. At HP we are excited to play a
holiday 2016.
leading role in driving this fledgling industry to
Our success with HTC led to a partnership the mainstream and honored to help write the
deal with Oculus to provide Rift customers the next chapter in Virtual Reality.  
same benefits of a tested and certified PC at a
Madhu Athreya is a Distinguished Technologist
great price. In our final VR introduction of 2016
in HP Labs, where he leads development of
we launched one of the first VR enabled laptops
Computer Vision, Deep Learning, Smart-
Surfaces and Audio technologies.
at a very low price, opening VR to our many
Paul Martin is a Distinguished Technologist
customers who prefer gaming notebooks to
in the Workstation Global Business Unit,
where he leads the AR and VR efforts.
gaming desktops.
In the commercial space we have a full com-
Bob Campbell is a Distinguished Technologist
in R&D in the Business Personal Systems
plement of Workstations that are VR Ready, the
Global Business Unit, where he leads a VR
Z240, Z440, Z640 and Z840 systems which fea-
development in the Innovation and
Experiences team.
ture NVIDIA Quadro P4000, P5000 and P6000
John Ludwig is a product manager in the
graphics. We also are offering the Zbook 17
Personal Systems Global Business Unit,
where he leads the VR and gaming
G4 Mobile Workstation with NVIDIA P4000 and
efforts.
P5000 graphics. In the commercial desktop
Mike Ho is an Engineering Program Manager
space we offer the EliteDesktop 800 G3 Tower
at Taiwan Design Center, HP. Mike leads all
the qualification work as program manager
with NVIDIA GTX 1080 graphics. We are seeing
on VR.
strong interest in all our commercial market seg-
Robert Centa is Personal Systems Senior
ments including Digital Media and Entertainment,
Strategy Manager at HP. Responsible for
developing strategy, market insights, com-
AEC, Product Design, Training and Simulation,
petitive responses, and performance.
Healthcare and Education.
HP products already on the market
Issue 6 · Spring 2017 · Innovation Journal 9