Better computer graphics based on gaze direction

Virtual Reality (VR) and Augmented Reality (AR) are already starting to have a huge impact on how people work and entertain themselves. These technologies are very dependent on computer graphics and so, the field will see major changes during the next decade.

Foveated rendering

Displays for VR and AR usually have only one user and

it can be measured what part of the screen the user is looking at. Leaps in image quality can be achieved with so called foveated rendering, which is a graphics optimization that focuses rendering computations in the area where the user's gaze is fixed.

Path tracing

Currently rendering for VR and AR applications is done with so called rasterization. However, conventionally non-real-time rendering method of path tracing is an interesting option, because it generates better image quality. Moreover, it allows flexible sampling in screen space, which perfectly suits to the idea of foveated rendering.

In my PhD Thesis project, the two worlds of path tracing and foveated VR rendering are combined. The objective is to enable photo-realistic real-time rendering in VR and AR. In the project, we have developed new ways of distributing the path tracing samples and reconstructing noise free images from them. The hard part of the process is that samples are both sparse and noisy. Our goal is to reconstruct an image where the user doesn’t notice any errors. At the same time, we try to reduce the number of samples so much that the offline rendering method of path tracing can be done in real-time.

More info can be found at the group’s webpage: www.tut.fi/vga

Matias Koskela is a doctoral student in Virtual reality and Graphics Architectures (VGA) group at Laboratory of Pervasive Computing in Tampere University of Technology. His research interests include optimizations and parallelism in real-time rendering, especially in real-time ray tracing.