Comparison of projection methods for rendering virtual reality

Virtual reality is rapidly gaining popularity, and may soon become a common way of viewing 3D environments. While stereo rendering has been performed on consumer grade graphics processors for a while now, the new wave of virtual reality display devices have two properties that typical applications have not needed to consider before. Pixels no longer appear on regular grids and the displays subtend a wide field-of-view. In this paper, we evaluate several techniques designed to efficiently render for head-mounted displays with such properties. We show that the amount of rendered pixels can be reduced down to 36% without compromising visual fidelity compared to traditional rendering, by rendering multiple optimized sub-projections.