The Impact of Foveated Rendering as Used for Head-Mounted Displays in Interactive Video Games

Sammanfattning: Introduction: In this study, foveated rendering has been explored as its impacton people in a virtual reality (VR) video game setting. Foveated rendering has thepotential to decrease the performance cost of virtual reality gaming by only renderingthe part of the scene where the user is looking. It achieves this with the use of aneye tracker. Although, this study does not focus on the performance gain.Related Work: The work that has previously been done has mostly focused onperformance. Studies that concentrate on how it affects people have only used ascene with a still or moving target in it. This work will expand upon this by includingit in a whole game instead. Method: A user study is conducted to test the perceived visual quality by playinga fast-paced game that requires a lot of eye and head movements. This is tested asa first-person shooter game, which is played thrice with different types of foveation.Those being no foveation, static, and dynamic foveated rendering and comparingthem with each other. The user study performed to test this had 20 participants whoplayed the game and answered a questionnaire afterward regarding the quality. These participants were experienced in normal gaming but had little previous experiencewith virtual reality. Results and Analysis: The results show that the majority do not notice a differencein quality between the game types. However, the type most people preferred wasfoveated rendering without the use of an eye tracker, called static foveation.Discussion: The results demonstrate that video games can effectively incorporatefoveated rendering, resulting in significant performance improvements with minimaldrawbacks. However, it is important to note that foveated techniques have certainhardware requirements that may limit their widespread adoption. One such require-ment is Variable Rate Shading, which is becoming increasingly prevalent as it issupported by all new graphics cards. This means that the market may more easilyadopt foveated rendering techniques that do not rely on an eye tracker. Additionally,a built-in eye tracker in headsets is another hardware requirement that might makeit harder for that to happen.Conclusion: Foveated rendering has almost no impact on the perceived quality of VR games which can lead to performance gains and makes it easier for people to getfeel more immersed in them.