Microsoft detailed a new software update available for some Windows MR headsets, including the Reverb G2, that will increase the visual fidelity by improving corrections made for artifacts such as chromatic aberration and light leakage.
The blog post was written by Alex Vlachos, a former member of Valve’s VR team who joined Microsoft as a ‘Partner Architect in Mixed Reality’ earlier this year. Vlachos says that many of these new corrections and improvements came about during the development of the HP Reverb G2.
The team “spent considerable time improving our approach to reducing chromatic aberration”, resulting in a new algorithm that makes better corrections to the image, and results in a cleaner view when viewed through headset lenses.
“A white pixel on the panels will refract through the lenses and separate into red, green, and blue pixels visible to the viewer. Chromatic aberration correction aims to adjust for this by pre-distorting the rendered image so that the image viewed by the user after lens refraction appears as a single white pixel as intended,” the blog post explains.
Vlachos says this helps eliminate a lot of chromatic aberration, as per the image below.
Microsoft also made improvements to correct for light leakage. The new corrections implemented will reduce color fringing and color tinting that comes from light leakage, as pictured below.
While these improvements came about during development for the Reverb G2, they will also be applied to the Samsung Odyssey+ and the original HP Reverb. For the former, Microsoft has improved chromatic aberration at the periphery of the lenses. For the latter, the team was able to “improve chromatic aberration artifacts, reduce radial distortion, apply light leak correction, and improve rendering performance by about 8% in most applications.” All of these improvements will also be applied to the Reverb G2.
The update is available now in the latest Windows Mixed Reality VR runtime, which can be downloaded using Windows Update.
If you haven’t already, be sure to check out our Reverb G2 unboxing video and keep an eye out for our full review of the headset coming later this week.
