Towards real-time ray tracing through foveated rendering

Abstract

Foveated rendering is a technique that leverages the rapidly declining perceived quality of human vision towards the periphery to speed up 3D rendering. In this thesis a method is proposed to apply foveated rendering to ray tracing in order to bring ray tracing to the realm of real-time interactive applications. The proposed method consists of sampling according to a perceptually based distribution and the reconstruction of the image through interpolation. An experiment with 17 participants was performed in order to look for the optimal interpolation method and the experiment showed similar performance with each interpolation method, but revealed the foveation method’s sensitivity to high contrast when using lower density distributions due to the precomputed nature of the distribution. Without changes to the method, such as generating a content-aware distribution each frame, this eliminates the possibility of using lower density distributions that would require fewer samples. However, even with the base density distribution the method still provides a base speedup of 4.3 times.