Google open-sources Seurat rendering tool that enables high-detail mobile VR

Offering a tethered VR-like experience on completely standalone headsets is about to become easier for developers, as Seurat — a Google pre-rendering tool teased by the company at last year’s I/O conference — is going open source. Google describes Seurat as a “scene simplification technology” with particular benefits for mobile VR devices, but the technology could improve performance across more powerful VR hardware, too.

Seurat radically reduces the processing demands for VR by using high-quality assets for advance calculations of all possibly viewable perspectives for a given scene, then removing everything that can’t be seen. As Google explains, Seurat “takes RGBD images (color and depth) as input and generates a textured mesh, targeting a configurable number of triangles, texture size, and fill rate to simplify scenes beyond what traditional methods can achieve.” The dramatic reduction in polygon complexity enables performance-constrained standalone headsets to display 3D scenes that look real and to offer six degrees of freedom (6DoF) head tracking without hiccups.