by peregrine » 23 Jan 2020 16:55
First off, this is how the human eye works. So one can assume it's pretty well optimized for what ever the requirements were (usually energy consumption eg less rods and cones in the retina).
What this does is reducing the necessary bandwidth, in this case for head-mounted displays, resulting in higher resolution displays or more refresh rate. And since this came from Facebook Research (read Oculus) i guess there is a purpose for that.
This will most likely consume more processing power if it's implemented in software. The human brain is parallel by design. CPUs barely are. But implemented on GPUs or in Hardware, depending on how much an issue layout is? Yeah this will be more efficient because high bandwidth links consume shitload of power.