Perceptually-Driven Graphics
Ellen J S Zagier · 1997
The purpose of this paper is to explicitly raise a topic that has either been on the back burner, has found itself a subtopic of other areas, or has been traditionally embedded in a tangential field. The secondary purpose is to explore a topic which is of interest to many facets of computer graphics and is relatively new enough to inspire very lively discussion and creative thinking. Perceptually-driven graphics, as I present it here, has the primary purpose of computing only that information which is ultimately usable by the human visual system. Its purpose is pure efficiency. In all but a few very experimental systems, the amount of computation done to produce a final image is many orders of magnitude greater than the amount of information the human visual system can possibly process. Perceptually-driven graphics ideally takes into account every piece of usable, existing knowledge about what the eye actually "sees" to drive computation. It directly exploits the logarithmic falloff of resolution from foveal center to extreme periphery. This paper will also stimulate questions such as: How does a perceptually-driven graphics system fit in with current image-based rendering strategies and with Frameless Rendering? How does it work with new research in multiuser displays? And finally, how crucial is effective eye tracking technology?