I suspect we have all heard about simulator sickness, akin to motion sickness, caused by latency/lag in providing images to VR headsets. Now NVIDIA is showing an experimental zero latency display. The site Road to VR has the story in an article: NVIDIA Demonstrates Experimental “Zero Latency” Display Running at 1,700Hz.

NVIDIA debuted their experimental display at GTC 2016. The current 90hz displays render an image every 11ms. NVIDIA gets an image on screen in 0.58ms. Wow. 

This tells us some interesting things about VR. Making the display 20 times faster makes for, they say, an amazing difference in the quality of the experience. I think it also reduces the possibility of simulator sickness. But, it also increases the demand on the video engine rendering the images and the movement detection systems.

The desktop systems we have now barely generate the images we need. We were just getting to 120hz for shutter glass 3D and they only need alternating images. Now the stereo imaging needed for simultaneous duel images doubles the number needed. But, that isn’t that much of a step up, only 180 images per second. At 1,700hz that could handle 3,400 images per second and I’m pretty sure we don’t have any devices capable of that render speed.

As for mobile… mobile is way far away from that type of render power… years… may be a decade or more? Probably not. But, it’s out there a ways.

But, better display tech helps and moves things forward.