Foveated light-field display and real-time rendering for virtual reality

Abstract

Glasses-free light field displays have significantly progressed due to advances in high-resolution microdisplays and high-end graphics processing units (GPUs). However, for near-eye light-field displays requiring portability, the fundamental trade-off regarding achieved spatial resolution remains: Retinal blur quality must be degraded; otherwise, computational consumption increases. This has prevented synthesizing the high-quality light field from being fast.By integrating off-the-shelf gaze tracking modules into near-eye light-field displays,we presentwearable virtual reality prototypes supporting human visual system-oriented focus cues. An optimized, foveated light field is delivered to each eye subject to the gaze point, providing more natural visual experiences than state-of-the-art solutions. Importantly, the factorization runtime can be immensely reduced, since the image resolution is only high within the gaze cone. In addition, we demonstrate significant improvements in computation and retinal blur quality over counterpart near-eye displays.