Improved pre-warping for wide angle, head mounted displays

Abstract

High-quality head mounted displays are becoming available in the consumer space. These displays provide an immersive gaming experience by filling the wearer's field of view. To achieve immersion with low cost, a commodity display panel is placed a short distance in front of each eye, and wide-angle optics are used to bring the image into focus. However, these optics introduce spatial and chromatic distortion into the image seen by the viewer. As a result, the images to be displayed must be pre-warped to cancel this distortion. This correction can be performed by warping the image in a post-processing step, by warping the scene geometry before rendering, or by modeling corrective optics in the virtual camera. Here, we examine the image quality and performance of several correction methods. Though image warping with a bilinear filter is common [Antonov et al. 2013], we find that bicubic filtering yields improved image quality with minimal performance impact. We also propose a new method for correcting chromatic distortion by warping the image using distortion meshes, and we propose a method for correcting spatial and chromatic distortion accurately in-camera.