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Foveated Path Tracing

A Literature Review and a Performance Gain Analysis

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Advances in Visual Computing (ISVC 2016)

Part of the book series: Lecture Notes in Computer Science ((LNIP,volume 10072))

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Abstract

Virtual Reality (VR) places demanding requirements on the rendering pipeline: the rendering is stereoscopic and the refresh rate should be as high as 95 Hz to make VR immersive. One promising technique for making the final push to meet these requirements is foveated rendering, where the rendering effort is prioritized on the areas where the user’s gaze lies. This requires rapid adjustment of level of detail based on screen space coordinates. Path tracing allows this kind of changes without much extra work. However, real-time path tracing is fairly new concept. This paper is a literature review of techniques related to optimizing path tracing with foveated rendering. In addition, we provide a theoretical estimation of performance gains available and calculate that 94% of the paths could be omitted. For this reason we predict that path tracing can soon meet the demanding rendering requirements of VR.

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Acknowledgement

We would like to thank anonymous reviewers for fruitful comments and Williams College and the Stanford University scanning repository for the 3D models. In addition, we are thankful to our funding sources: TUT graduate school, TEKES (project “Parallel Acceleration 3”, funding decision 1134/31/2015), European Commission in the context of ARTEMIS project ALMARVI (ARTEMIS 2013 GA 621439) and industrial research fund of TUT by Tuula and Yrjö Neuvo.

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Authors and Affiliations

  1. Department of Pervasive Computing, Tampere University of Technology, Tampere, Finland

    Matias Koskela, Timo Viitanen, Pekka Jääskeläinen & Jarmo Takala

Authors
  1. Matias Koskela
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  2. Timo Viitanen
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  3. Pekka Jääskeläinen
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  4. Jarmo Takala
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Corresponding author

Correspondence to Matias Koskela .

Editor information

Editors and Affiliations

  1. University of Nevada , Reno, Nevada, USA

    George Bebis

  2. NASA Ames Research Center , Moffett Field, California, USA

    Richard Boyle

  3. Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory , Berkeley, California, USA

    Bahram Parvin

  4. Desert Research Institute , Reno, Nevada, USA

    Darko Koracin

  5. The Australian National University , O'Malley, Aust Capital Terr, Australia

    Fatih Porikli

  6. Pilot AI Labs , Redwood City, California, USA

    Sandra Skaff

  7. University of Florida , Gainesville, Florida, USA

    Alireza Entezari

  8. Google Inc. , Mountain View, California, USA

    Jianyuan Min

  9. Osaka University , Osaka, Japan

    Daisuke Iwai

  10. The MOVES Institute , Monterey, California, USA

    Amela Sadagic

  11. University of Arizona , Tucson, Arizona, USA

    Carlos Scheidegger

  12. Université Paris-Sud , Orsay, France

    Tobias Isenberg

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Koskela, M., Viitanen, T., Jääskeläinen, P., Takala, J. (2016). Foveated Path Tracing. In: Bebis, G., et al. Advances in Visual Computing. ISVC 2016. Lecture Notes in Computer Science(), vol 10072. Springer, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-50835-1_65

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  • DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-50835-1_65

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  • Publisher Name: Springer, Cham

  • Print ISBN: 978-3-319-50834-4

  • Online ISBN: 978-3-319-50835-1

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