Foveated instant preview for progressive rendering

Abstract

Progressive rendering, for example Monte Carlo rendering of 360 • content for virtual reality headsets, is a time-consuming task. If the 3D artist notices an error while previewing the rendering, he or she must return to editing mode, do the required changes, and restart rendering. Restart is required because the rendering system cannot know which pixels are affected by the change. We propose the use of eye-tracking-based optimization to significantly speed up previewing the artist's points of interest. Moreover, we derive an optimized version of the visual acuity model, which follows the original model more accurately than previous work. The proposed optimization was tested with a comprehensive user study. The participants felt that preview with the proposed method converged instantly, and the recorded split times show that the preview is 10 times faster than conventional preview. In addition, the system does not have measurable drawbacks on computational performance.

Foveated rendering: A state-of-the-art survey

“…Ray tracing was used to render the foveal region and rasterization to render the peripheral region. To speed up previewing the artist's points of interest, Koskela et al [119,124] applied foveated rendering to progressive Monte Carlo rendering, which omits more than 90% of rays that must be traced in real time. Their user study demonstrated that the perceived convergence of the proposed method was 10× faster than that of a conventional preview, and participants rated the method to have only marginally more artifacts in areas where it had to start rendering from scratch.…”

Instantaneous foveated preview for progressive Monte Carlo rendering

“…We extend our previous work [4] with an additional evaluation of the questionnaire presented to the participants of the user study, and an evaluation of how the participants assessed artifacts in the results.…”