Locomotion-aware Foveated Rendering

Abstract

Optimizing rendering performance improves the user's immersion in virtual scene exploration. Foveated rendering uses the features of the human visual system (HVS) to improve rendering performance without sacrificing perceptual visual quality. We collect and analyze the viewing motion of different locomotion methods, and describe the effects of these viewing motions on HVS's sensitivity, as well as the advantages of these effects that may bring to foveated rendering. Then we propose the locomotion-aware foveated rendering method (LaFR) to further accelerate foveated rendering by leveraging the advantages. In LaFR, we first introduce the framework of LaFR. Secondly, we propose an eccentricity-based shading rate controller that provides the shading rate control of the given region in foveated rendering. Thirdly, we propose a locomotion-aware log-polar mapping method, which controls the foveal average shading rate, the peripheral shading rate decrease speed, and the overall shading quantity with the locomotion-aware coefficients based on the eccentricity-based shading rate controller. LaFR achieves similar perceptual visual quality as the conventional foveated rendering while achieving up to 1.6× speedup. Compared with the full resolution rendering, LaFR achieves up to 3.8× speedup.