View-Region Optimized Image-Based Scene Simplification

We present a new algorithm for image-based simplification of complex scenes for virtual reality (VR). The algorithm transforms geometrically-detailed environments into a layered quad tile representation that is optimized for a specified viewing region and is renderable on low-power mobile-class VR devices. A novel constrained optimization formulation ensures that the scene can be rendered within a predetermined compute budget, with limits on both primitive count and fill rate. Furthermore, we introduce a new method for texturing from point samples of the original scene geometry that generates high-quality silhouettes without the drawbacks of traditional point splatting. The resulting representation achieves a visual fidelity that was previously impossible on mobile graphics hardware; our algorithm can typically generate a high-quality representation of visually-rich scenes with billions of triangles using just 72k triangles and a single high-resolution texture map (with generally only about 50% more texels than a stereo panorama). The effectiveness of the approach is demonstrated with a set of challenging test cases.