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Allowing viewers to explore virtual reality in a headmounted display with six degrees of freedom (6-DoF) greatly enhances the associated immersion and comfort. It makes the experience more compelling compared to a fixed-viewpoint 2-DoF rendering produced by conventional algorithms using data from a stationary camera rig. In this work, we use subjective testing to study the relative importance of, and the interaction between, motion parallax and binocular disparity as depth cues that shape the perception of 3D environments by human viewers. Additionally, we use the recorded head trajectories to estimate the distribution of the head movements of a sedentary viewer exploring a virtual environment with 6-DoF. Finally, we demonstrate a real-time virtual reality rendering system that uses a Stacked OmniStereo intermediary representation to provide a 6-DoF viewing experience by utilizing data from a stationary camera rig. We outline the challenges involved in developing such a system and discuss the limitations of our approach.

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Most of the real-world virtual reality (VR) content available today is captured and rendered from a fixed vantage point. The visual-vestibular conflict arising from the lack of head-motion parallax degrades the feeling of presence in the virtual environment and has been shown to induce nausea and visual discomfort. We present an end-to-end framework for VR with head-motion parallax for real-world scenes. To capture both horizontally and vertically separated perspectives, we use a camera rig with two vertically stacked rings of outward-facing cameras. The data from the rig are processed offline and stored into a compact intermediate representation, which is used to render novel views for a head-mounted display, in accordance with the viewer's head movements. We compare two promising intermediate representations -Stacked OmniStereo and Layered Depth Panoramas -and evaluate them in terms of objective image quality metrics and the occurrence of disocclusion holes in synthesized novel views.