Modern VR headsets, like the Apple Vision Pro, contain the equivalent of two teeny-tiny 4k TVs, one for each eyeball.

Not long ago, it would have taken a supercomputer to push this many pixels, but now, a portable chip will do the job.

But there’s a trick happening here—misdirection worthy of a seasoned magician.

The truth is, today’s chips aren’t powerful enough to run two displays like that, even now.

But because these headsets can track our eye movement, they know to only really render the pixels we happen to be looking at. This is called foveated rendering.

The rest is an approximation that we don’t notice, because we can’t focus on the periphery. The change happens so fast, the illusion is that we have pixel-perfect resolution everywhere we look.

Not only is this clever, it’s also true of life: We see what we’re focusing on in incredible detail, and everything else is just a sea blurry shapes that feel more-or-less right without further inspection.