Construction and Evaluation of an Ultra Low Latency Frameless Renderer for VR

Abstract: Latency is detrimental to VR. Typically considered to be discrete in time and space, in practice it changes across the display – and how it does so depends on the rendering approach used. We present an ultra-low latency realtime ray-caster: a frameless renderer with a distinct latency profile to that of a traditional frame-based system. We examine its performance when driving an Oculus DK2, comparing it with a GPU based system. We find that ours, with a lower latency, has higher fidelity under user motion, and that low display persistence reduces the sensitivity to velocity of both systems.