[March 17, 2014]

Reach 120 fps and Build Bigger VR Environments with the Umbra 3 Stereo Camera Feature

Umbra Software announced today that it has added Virtual Reality (VR) specific optimizations to its Umbra 3 Visibility Solution. The company is introducing Stereo Camera functionality, a new sophisticated feature for optimizing VR applications, as part of its Game Developers Conference 2014 line-up.

The Umbra 3 Visibility Solution will help by optimizing the performance so that the highest degree of fidelity can be achieved automatically. It quickly determines what the game engine needs to draw so that no time is wasted on the hidden parts.

The stereo effect in VR requires that the image is drawn twice, once for each eye. Umbra 3 Stereo Camera feature eliminates the need for doing the visibility operation individually for both images. Instead, Umbra 3 uses the results of a single visibility operation with no additional cost - effectively halving the required processing time.

Umbra 3 Stereo Camera helps in achieving VR performance requirements, which are much higher than traditional video games. The VR performance requirements are defined by the following two reasons:

• Immersion. Ocuus VR currently recommends that the absolute minimum frame-rate is 60 fps, below which players might feel disoriented. A low-persistence display, such as the Oculus Rift prototype "Crystal Cove", requires substantially higher frame rates of 120 fps or more to maintain comfortable experience and immersion.
• Low overall latency. A recommended soft-limit of 20 milliseconds of overall latency for motion-to-photons latency. It is obvious that to reach this target, it is imperative to process the each frame much faster than that.

To read more details about the Umbra 3 Stereo Camera, go to http://www.umbra3.com/vr.

Umbra Software will be present at the Game Developer Conference 2014 held in San Francisco between March 19 - 21.

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About Umbra Software

Umbra Software Ltd. is a graphics software technology company founded in 2007 and based in Helsinki, Finland. Umbra Software specializes in occlusion culling, visibility and rendering optimization technology and provides middleware for all major console hardware platforms, mobile devices and the PC.

The Umbra 3 visibility solution powers up real-time graphics performance and productivity with automatic occluder generation and software based occlusion culling. It is being used in such video games as Call of Duty®: Ghosts from Activision (News - Alert), Killzone: Shadow Fall from Sony Computer Entertainment Inc., World of Tanks from Wargaming.net and Destiny from Bungie, to boost the game's real-time graphical performance.

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