Oculus has made it possible for users with lower-end PC's to enjoy virtual reality by rolling out "Asynchronous Spacewarp" (ASW).

ASW enables Oculus Rift headsets to smoothly render virtual realms seamlessly with frame-blending techniques. This allows any VR title to run at half the normal frame rate of 90 Hz to just 45 Hz and the Oculus Rift VR Headset will "synthetically" fill in the other half for a smooth VR experience. The process lowers the Oculus Rift's system requirements without sacrificing immersive VR thus opening up the VR platforms to more users.

The constraints of having to purchase more powerful machines just to run VR are negated by Oculus' ASW. ASW in the Oculus Rift is a frame rate-smoothing algorithm that automatically engages whenever the Rift encounters frame drops due to lack of PC computing power, according to Digital Trends.

Oculus CEO Brendan Iribe during the Oculus Connect 3 conference said that ASW would help lower-end systems to get into VR. Earlier, Oculus introduced Asynchronous Timewarp (ATW), which Iribe says, is "great for looking around," but it does not do well for positional movement.

ASW helps reduce latency and prevents image judder that is caused by frame drops. It not only extends the anti-judder technology from the conventional head motion tracking but to translation tracking as well. What's more, the system is automatically enabled once it encounters frame drops.

To accomplish this feat, ASW takes the two previous 45 fps frames of the running application and analyzes the difference in the two. It then calculates the difference to extrapolate and generate a "synthetic" frame when it hits a snag and presses that frame in between to return it to 90 fps.

No need to buy a new Oculus VR Headset

Users who already have earlier Oculus VR Headsets can have ATW and ASW via a normal firmware update. However, your machine must be able to satisfy the minimum system requirement to enjoy VR, as reported here.

Minimum System Requirements with Oculus VR Headset

NVidia 960 or better graphics card Intel i3-6100 or an AMD FX4350 CPU

8GB or more RAM Windows 8 or higher

Check out the video below that employs Asynchronous Spacewarp.

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Topics Oculus, Oculus rift, Virtual Reality Headset