While we lack spatial resolution in the periphery, we can be very sensitive to movement or changes there. So I think you would need a pretty accurate and stable

While we lack spatial resolution in the periphery, we can be very sensitive to movement or changes there. So I think you would need a pretty accurate and stable low resolution rendering method to avoid inducing unintended perceptions of movement. I assume saving power means skipping a lot of processing, which sounds to me like undersampling i.e. the opposite of the supersampling used to get good renderings today. But, it is hard for me to imagine how a generic 3D modeled scene can be undersampled for the periphery without introducing horribly unnatural aliasing artifacts. In other words, you still need to determine proportional occlusion and lighting of all the elements in the scene to understand which blurry colors to show. You can't just cast a few rays and stretch them to fill the periphery. Otherwise, slight camera or object movements might lead to chaotic flashing of peripheral colors as the reduced samples stochastically observe different scene elements while ignoring the rest. I know of things like multi-resolution texture pyramids which can precompute a blurred version to allow undersampled texture rendering. And I know many games switch between different low/high polygonal representations of objects (or even cull objects) based on distance to the camera, which often produces obvious "popping" artifacts as the user moves through the 3D world. Are there general scene modeling techniques that can work as smoothly as multi-resolution textures to allow rapid or simultaneous use of different levels of geometric detail in one rendering? I think those popping artifacts would be much more distracting if tied to every eye movement rather than only with navigation across a 3D world. Crude, culling methods would be inadequate if they just drop peripheral objects that might otherwise produce the kind of peripheral image that would cause the user to change their gaze...