"Vision processing unit" chips from California manufacturer Movidius will power Lenovo's future virtual reality products, the two companies announced today.
The Chinese electronics giant is the latest VR maker to partner with Movidius, whose chips are also used in Google's Project Tango (of which Lenovo is a partner) as well as a variety of consumer products.
Lenovo will use the Myriad 2 VPU, an ultra low-power chip designed to run algorithms that power head tracking, gesture recognition, and other VR staples. It includes two CPU cores, an array of vector processors, and hardware acceleration in a tiny package that can fit inside phones, cameras, and other devices.
The chip handles all the device's vision-processing tasks using just one watt of power, improving battery life and freeing up the CPU and GPU for other resource-intensive tasks.
One of its most unique applications to date is the Flir One thermal imaging camera. Most thermal imaging cameras are designed for commercial use and cost thousands of dollars, but harnessing the power of Movidius's VPU, the Flir One packs the same heat sensing-technology into a $349 iPhone case.
The original Myriad VPU was used in Google's Tango prototype phone in 2014. Since then, Movidius has also been working on bringing efficient image processing to more devices with its Fathom Compute Stick, which offers vision processing to pretty much any device with a USB port.
Lenovo did not mention specific products that will use the Myriad VPU, but we expect to see some VR products unveiled at its Tech World conference in San Francisco on Thursday. That includes details about the first consumer version of the Project Tango phone, which will go on sale this summer.