Microsoft has been working on their holographic VR headset Hololens, however the company has unveiled a curious new piece of virtual reality tech which could be potentially beneficial to all VR hardware and software-makers in the business.

The new technology, dubbed simply Irides, puts all of the graphics computation onto the cloud, which means all of these powerful HMD devices could eventually become essentially just wifi-enabled displays. This could be very beneficial to reducing the amount of potential heat, energy consumption, and more that current HMD designs are dealing with.

You’re probably thinking what I’m thinking – this is entirely reliant on your ISP, your wifi speeds, and so on. While this is true, Irides has some interesting bells and whistles under its hood – namely its speculative execution on the server side of things.

What this means is that Irides will be calculating potential display frames, delivering those frames to the end user, completely before the user might end up at that potential movement/frame. This could lead to mishaps with the user getting a completely random frame, but there’s a workaround for this – the server client sends a simple approximation to the users current or near position.

You can view the new technology in action below in a demonstration video:

Microsoft isn’t working on a completely dedicated VR headset to employ technology like this (outside of Hololens), but it’ll be interesting to see if this ends up being integrated into other virtual reality interfaces.

Editor’s note: Above image is from the Zeiss VR One headset