Lenovo Planning VR Push Following Partnership with Movidius

    Chinese technology company Lenovo is well known for its PC, Laptops, Smart TV’s and mobile devices among its vast product line-up. To date its implementation of virtual reality (VR) focused tech has come by way of VR-ready PC’s in collaboration with NVIDIA, and the Lenovo K4 Note VR combo. Today ultra-low power machine vision technology, Movidius, has announced a strategic partnership with Lenovo to provide advanced vision processing technology to a variety of VR-centric products.

    This new agreement means Lenovo can source Movidius’ Myriad 2 Vision Processing Unit (VPU) and custom computer vision algorithms for its VR projects.

    The Myriad 2 has been designed specifically for handling challenging vision-based tasks such as head tracking, gesture recognition, and blending multiple video streams into interactive VR video whilst running at ultra-low power. The chip features a flexible configuration of 12 high performance programmable vector cores, a built-in Image Signal Processor (ISP) and hardware accelerators. This enables it to offload vision related tasks from a device’s CPU and GPU, thus improving performance while its power consumption is only one Watt, making suitable for handheld and head-worn devices.

    “Our technology was built to maximize machine vision performance in a sub-1 Watt power budget.” says Movidius CEO, Remi El-Ouazzane. “In selecting Myriad 2 for their VR products, Lenovo is building devices designed from the ground-up for VR. We’re very much looking forward to these no-compromise devices that will push VR adoption into the mainstream.”

    “Lenovo has a long tradition of bringing innovative products to the market. Myriad 2 is unique in its ability to deliver the kind of vision compute performance we need for our next generation VR products.” Says Lenovo’s Shanghai Research & Technology group Manager, Li Xiang. “We can build the products we want, without compromising on cost, size, performance or battery life.”

    As for when the first Lenovo products featuring the Myriad 2 chip are expected, the latter half of 2016 should see them rollout. What devices they’re likely to be hasn’t yet been revealed but more details are expected at Lenovo’s Tech World event taking place 9th June, 2016 in San Francisco.

    For all the latest VR news from Lenovo keep reading VRFocus.

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