PixelView
J. Stewart, Eric Bennett, Leonard McMillan · 2004
We present a new computer graphics rendering architecture that allows "all possible views" to be extracted from a single traversal of a scene description. It supports a wide range of rendering primitives, including polygonal meshes, higher-order surface primitives (e.g. spheres, cylinders, and parametric patches), point-based models, and image-based representations. To demonstrate our concept, we have implemented a hardware prototype that includes a 4D, z-buffered frame-buffer supporting dynamic view selection at the time of raster scan-out. As a result, our implementation supports extremely low display-update latency. The Pixel-View architecture also supports rendering of the same scene for multiple eyes, which provides immediate benefits for stereo viewing methods like those used in today's virtual environments, particularly when there are multiple participants. In the future, view-independent graphics rendering hardware will also be essential to support the multitude of viewpoints required for real-time autostereoscopic and holographic display devices.