Google’s Seurat tech brought a ‘Rogue One’ scene to life in incredible detail on Daydream VR

One of the main issues with mobile VR such as Daydream or Samsung’s Gear VR is that even the top of the line smartphones just don’t have the processing power required to smoothly render graphically intense visuals. To help with this, Google has created Seurat, a tool that takes full 3D environments and turns them into scenes that can be viewed on mobile VR, all without losing huge amounts of quality…

To demonstrate what Seurat is capable of, Google worked with IMXLAB, a Lucasfilm company, and brought a scene from Rogue One to mobile VR. The way that Seurat works is by taking renders of a 3D scene from different viewpoints and angles, and then mapping these renders to a “low-polygon VR scene.”

Basically, instead of having to render a high-fidelity digital environment in real-time, Seurat is used to recreate just the outside visuals of the scene. By removing the extra details from within the environment itself, mobile VR devices can handle the rendering that was required to bring the film-quality scene to life.

Google hasn’t yet stated when other content creators will be able to get their hands on Seurat. We are thinking that Google might let developers start using Seurat soon, though, so that they can start working on improving their VR applications before Daydream 2.0 and WorldSense headsets get released later this year.