Once HoloLens Project shown some potential, maybe Microsfot should not spend time to “conventional” virtual reality, but on the contrary, the Redmond company is interested in being closely involved in such developments and technologies.

Microsoft believes that there is much room for improvement in virtual reality solutions that are flourishing in the market, whether related to mobile devices as standalone devices such as Oculus Rift style. They should improve quality graphics, also in response time, and to solve it they want to create Microsoft Irides.

Something was already known about Irides, last year Microsoft Research was sending some prototype development helmets to lucky testers. The philosophy behind the project is to utilize the cloud to download to computers, but that process would be at home, and the technology used for this is known as Kahawai and Outatime. In the following video you have an introduction to the technology:

Mainly what we try is to download graphic work, to be held in servers, but the interesting thing is the low latency that can be achieved with Kahawai, and therefore less need for bandwidth. Part of the magic of Irides and Kahawai is a prediction system in the graphics processing, which do not showed many details. We understand that the system is able to interpret what we will do in the game, and so is preparing the next graphics display.

Irides also improves viewing angles, and plays down qualities in areas that will not be active, all based on a spherical mesh. The media tests have been conducted via Doom 3, using “normal” versions, and passed by the improved graphics technology via Microsoft Research, with remarkable differences in practice, both in graphics and network latency (13ms).

First video of Microsoft Research: Irides VR in action