Imagination, 3Glasses Team Up For Mass-Market Ray-Tracing VR Tech

By Derek Forrest
published

Imagination Technologies and 3Glasses announced a joint collaboration to promote ray-tracing technology in mass-market consumer virtual reality (VR) devices.

Respectively, each company brings its own expertise to the table in the partnership, with Imagination supplying a capable ray-tracing GPU with its PowerVR Wizard GR6500 and 3Glasses providing VR peripheral manufacturing prowess. When we saw the GR6500 in action at CES, the Wizard completed render passes more than five times faster than Nvidia’s GeForce GTX 980 Ti.

Despite the proven acumen of Imagination’s ray-tracing technology in a desktop environment, the partnership with 3Glasses could be a play at the mobile market. Although a specific product wasn't announced, 3Glasses noted the technology’s ability to meet the power ceilings and form factor of mobile devices.

“PowerVR ray tracing technology is unique high-end graphics technology that is available in mobile power budgets and form factors,” said Wei Huang, CSO of 3Glasses. “We look forward to this technology enabling our VR products to go to the next level.”

With a comment of that nature, and the mainstream desktop/console VR market seemingly already spoken for by Oculus, HTC and (soon) PSVR, the next level for Imagination and 3Glasses could be mobile VR devices. How that might relate to Google's new Daydream platform is anyone's guess.

Derek Forrest is an Associate Contributing Writer for Tom’s Hardware and Tom’s IT Pro. Follow Derek Forrest on Twitter. Follow us on Facebook, Google+, RSS, Twitter and YouTube.

Derek Forrest
Derek Forrest
Derek Forrest is a Contributing Writer for Tom's Hardware US. He writes hardware news and reviews gaming desktops and laptops.
2 Comments Comment from the forums
  • Jeff Fx
    Oculus, Vive, and PSVR are just the providers of this generation of VR. There's still room for a company with good customer support, a good product, and a functional supply-chain to capture most of the VR market.

    The current VR companies are dysfunctional, so anyone making something as good as the Vive, but with functioning customer service, and available replacement parts, will dominate the market.
    Reply
  • bit_user
    This is great news! I really want to see Imagination's tech go somewhere, and raytracing is just the thing to take VR to the next level of realism!


    18198045 said:
    The current VR companies are dysfunctional, so anyone making something as good as the Vive, but with functioning customer service, and available replacement parts, will dominate the market.
    It's still early days, IMO. These are new companies (or new to this space), selling their first gen of a complex product, that's probably yet to even make a profit.

    I think it'd be wise to have a bit of patience. Nobody is forcing you to buy into this generation (hopefully).

    If you can't wait, then try to remember there's a reason people coined the term "bleeding edge". Take some pride in being a pioneer, and wear your scrapes and bruises like badges of honor. Years from now, you'll be telling people about the "bad old days", when VR first became popular.
    Reply