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.