Timewarp

Time warping is a technique in VR that reduces latency and increases Frame rate This process, called Post-rendering 3D warping, takes the already rendered image, modify it with freshly collected rotational and positional information from your HMD's sensors, then display it to your screen.

Without Time warping, your HMD would capture the data about the position of your head, render the image based on this data (correct angel etc.), then display the image when the next scene is due to be on screen. In a 60 fps game, a new scene is displayed once every 16.7 milliseconds. With this process, each image you see is based on the head-tracking data from almost 17 milliseconds ago.

With Time warping, the first 2 parts of the process is the same. your HMD would capture the data about the position of your head and render the image based on the data. Before this image is displayed, your HMD captures the position of your head again. Using this information, the rendered image is modified to fit the latest data. Finally the modified image is displayed on screen. The resulting image is more recent and more accurately depict the position of your head at the time of display than the image initially rendered. Time warping only works in very short intervals or the resulting image will look out of place.

Time warping moves 3D objects with little computational needs by utilizes depth maps aka. Z Buffers already present in the engine.

Time warping is a feature of Oculus SDK. It was initially released in the version 0.3.1 of the SDK.