Anybody try out AMD Privacy View yet?

SubCog

SubCog

Radeon 8500 64mb
Rage3D Subscriber
Apparently it's out now. Uses your webcam for eye tracking. Some people have speculated that they might be able to pivot this into foveated rendering in the future. No reason it couldn't work, assuming the tracking is fast and reasonably accurate.

Unfortunately, I'm in the middle of a move, and won't be able to setup my gaming PC for another couple of weeks. If anyone else tries it out, I'd be interested to hear how well it works.
 
Unfortunately I don't have webcam, I should try setting it up to see how it works out.

Love the thought about using it for fovated rendering on monitors. Could make for a killer feature. Especially on wider screens.
 
Finally got my computer out of storage, set up a webcam, and tried it. Interesting stuff, but not really great. The viewable circle is very large, and it would be easy for someone to look over your shoulder and see what you're looking at.

Definitely not an easy path to foveated rendering. Maybe if they could improve it over time?
 
Played with the settings a bit more today. Actually I think there's something here, and I think it could potentially be used for foveated rendering.

I've enlarged the area that's shown clearly, while increasing the gradualness of the fading around that area, and toned down the blur effect outside that. At this point, as long as I'm looking at a fixed point on the screen (and the camera is correctly tracking me eyes), I really don't even see the blurring at all. This is really the point, that the user shouldn't even see the blurring at all, but anyone looking over his shoulder should mostly see a blurry mess.

There's a significant amount of delay though, waiting for the eye-tracking to catch up to my eyeball movements. I'm sure part of that is because I'm using a 30fps webcam... I wonder if switching to a 60fps camera would help significantly? Maybe I can try hooking up my mirrorless to my computer and see if it makes a difference? Still, I'm not sure how much processing latency is included just in the eye tracking itself... it's possible that a faster camera wouldn't fix anything at all.

For a foveated rendering solution, you really need to move the foveation faster than the users eyes move. Theoretically you can make the system more robust to fast eye movements by making the circle of clarity larger. This is one reason that foveated rendering might be a better option for VR... as your eye movements are covering a much larger area of your fov than when you're on a monitor (which fundamentally covers a much smaller area of your vision).

Any games that include any kind of deferred rendering will be terrible for foveated rendering though. That's another area where VR games are better suited... VR game devs have already put a ton of work into reducing latency across the whole rendering pipeline.

I should also mention, that the eye tracking isn't always super accurate. Depends alot on calibration, which is a pain in the butt. But maybe these things can be improved in time?

I can imagine a future where eye-tracking is seen as an essential component of a gaming pc. Whether that's using a webcam, or some other eye-tracking device. If it works well for foveated rendering, and improves performance by 3.5x (as Sony has claimed about their new headset)... anyone who spends $800 on a new GPU would be a fool to not shell out a bit more for an eye-tracking camera.

Anyways, if I can try this with a faster webcam, I'll post my impressions again.
 
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I think to get it really really fast you would probably need something like a Tobii Eye tracker. Which this likely doesn't support.

Be curious if a faster/better camera makes it work better though.
 
Trunks0 said:
I think to get it really really fast you would probably need something like a Tobii Eye tracker. Which this likely doesn't support.

Be curious if a faster/better camera makes it work better though.
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Yeah, the Tobii would definitely be fast enough. And they market their product for gaming. But nothing for foveated rendering, as far as i can tell. Not sure why not.

I imagine once we get foveated rendering happening in VR gaming, we'll start to see efforts to do it on PC monitors too.
 
It would be particularly awesome for Ultrawide and Super Ultrawide.
 
Trunks0 said:
It would be particularly awesome for Ultrawide and Super Ultrawide.
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Unfortunately, AMD Privacy view won't work with large monitors. It says it maxes out at 30 inches... and my monitor is a 34 inch ultra-wide.

But if I turn my resolution down to 1920x1080 (large black bars on the sides), then it'll let me do the eye tracking.
 
I got my 60fps webcam today, and yes it works ALOT better. Not quite perfect, but it's a massive improvement.

I loaded up Quake 2 with the Privacy View turned on, to simulate foveated rendering. Actually it works pretty well. 80% of the time, I can't even see the blurring, and mostly when I do notice it, it's just a bit of vignetting around the periphery of my vision. I had my 13-year-old son try it... its pretty neat to watch from the side, so you can see how much blurring is happening that he can't even see.

Playing with the settings a bit more, and I can see that it works best if I make the clear viewing circle close to the maximum size... maybe 30% of the total screen area. The bigger the circle is, the more forgiving it is for small bits of latency or inaccurate tracking.

True foveated rendering should improve performance, but I'm just simulating it, and there's quite a performance cost. Quake 2 says it's still rendering 144fps, but the Privacy View seems to lock it down to about 60, plus some some additional stutters.

I'm now convinced that foveated rendering for desktop gaming is possible. For foveated rendering to work so well that you can't notice it, I think you'd need a bit faster web cam. Based on how close 60fps is, I expect 90-120fps would be enough. Also, eye tracking needs to be a bit more accurate than what I'm getting, and calibration needs to work better. Maybe they can improve these through software, or maybe you really need dedicated eye-tracking hardware. But there's definitely a path to making it work.

As I mentioned before, you'd also need to make sure that your games are not doing any deferred rendering. Quake 2 is a perfect test game, as there's no post-processing or anything.
 
SubCog said:
Yeah, the Tobii would definitely be fast enough. And they market their product for gaming. But nothing for foveated rendering, as far as i can tell. Not sure why not.

I imagine once we get foveated rendering happening in VR gaming, we'll start to see efforts to do it on PC monitors too.
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I think sony is using tobii eyetracking for foveated rendering in the PSVR 2 headset.
 
Mangler said:
I think sony is using tobii eyetracking for foveated rendering in the PSVR 2 headset.
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Yup, they are. And Sony's using it specifically for foveated rendering. They claim that it gives them a 3.5x improvement in rendering.
 
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