Improved Image Quality For HMDs Like Oculus Rift

[wraggster]

The combination of smartphone panels with relatively cheap and light-weight lenses enabled affordable wide-angle Head Mounted Displays like the Oculus Rift (http://games.slashdot.org/story/12/08/01/2031232/oculus-rift-virtual-reality-headset-blows-past-kickstarter-goal). However, these optics introduce distortions when viewing the image through the HMD. So far these have been compensated for in software by using post-processing pixel shaders that warp the image. However, by doing so a loss in image quality (sharpness) can be perceived. Now researchers from Intel found a way around this error by using different sampling for rendering (http://www.roadtovr.com/intel-claims-can-improve-image-quality-hmds-daniel-pohl-tells-us/), therefore potentially increasing the image quality of all current and future HMDs with a wide field of view."Rather than applying barrel distortion to the final raster image, the researchers warp the scene geometry during rasterization (http://www.qwrt.de/pdf/Improved-Pre-Warping-for-Wide-Angle-Head-Mounted-Displays.pdf). However, it currently requires ray tracing so it's a bit computationally expensive. Note that a vertex transformation can be used (with tessellation used to enhance the approximation), but the results are of variable quality.

http://tech.slashdot.org/story/13/10/23/1440253/improved-image-quality-for-hmds-like-oculus-rift