American multinational semiconductor company AMD today announced that it has acquired intellectual property and key engineering talent from Nitero, a company behind the development of wireless VR and augmented reality headsets.
Nitero’s tech promises low-latency performance without the need for wires, which means there will be less delay between the users actions and what they see in the display.
“Unwieldly headset cables remain a significant barrier to drive widespread adoption of virtual reality,” said Mark Papermaster, AMD chief technology officer and senior vice president.
This news comes after AMD announced the global availability of its Ryzen 5 desktop processors, and with many believing that VR is the next step for computing, its best that the semiconductor manufacturer gets into field sooner than later.
“Our newly acquired wireless VR technology is focused on solving this challenge,” he added, “and is another example of AMD making long-term technology investments to develop high-performance computing and graphics technologies that can create more immersive computing experiences.”
This is hardly the first attempt at making the VR experience wireless, with Oculus introducing its Santa Cruz prototype, and the recent reveal of the TPCast adapter for HTC’s VIVE headset. However Nitero’s tech uses 60GHz wireless chips for VR and AR, a technology has the potential to enable PCs to transmit multi-gigabit streams to headsets with low latency in room-scale VR environments.
“Our world-class engineering team has been focused on solving the difficult problem of building wireless VR technologies that can be integrated into next-generation headsets,” said Nitero co-founder and CEO Pat Kelly, who has joined AMD as corporate vice president in charge of wireless IP.