Real-time rendering method and performance evaluation of composable 3D lenses for interactive VR

We present and evaluate a new approach for real-time rendering of composable 3D lenses for polygonal scenes. Such lenses, usually called "volumetric lenses," are an extension of 2D Magic Lenses to 3D volumes in which effects are applied to scene elements. Although the composition of 2D lenses is well known, 3D composition was long considered infeasible due to both geometric and semantic complexity. Nonetheless, for a scene with multiple interactive 3D lenses, the problem of intersecting lenses must be considered. Intersecting 3D lenses in meaningful ways supports new interfaces such as hierarchical 3D windows, 3D lenses for managing and composing visualization options, or interactive shader development by direct manipulation of lenses providing component effects. Our 3D volumetric lens approach differs from other approaches and is one of the first to address efficient composition of multiple lenses. It is well-suited to head-tracked VR environments because it requires no view-dependent generation of major data structures, allowing caching and reuse of full or partial results. A Composite Shader Factory module composes shader programs for rendering composite visual styles and geometry of intersection regions. Geometry is handled by Boolean combinations of region tests in fragment shaders, which allows both convex and nonconvex CSG volumes for lens shape. Efficiency is further addressed by a Region Analyzer module and by broad-phase culling. Finally, we consider the handling of order effects for composed 3D lenses.