Foveated Rendering: a State-of-the-Art Survey

Lili Wang; Xuehuai Shi; Yi Liu

Home/Archive/arXiv

arXiv · 2211.07969

Foveated Rendering: a State-of-the-Art Survey

Lili Wang·Xuehuai Shi·Yi Liu

View original source ↗Read source document ↗Export metadata ↓

Abstract

Recently, virtual reality (VR) technology has been widely used in medical, military, manufacturing, entertainment, and other fields. These applications must simulate different complex material surfaces, various dynamic objects, and complex physical phenomena, increasing the complexity of VR scenes. Current computing devices cannot efficiently render these complex scenes in real time, and delayed rendering makes the content observed by the user inconsistent with the user's interaction, causing discomfort. Foveated rendering is a promising technique that can accelerate rendering. It takes advantage of human eyes' inherent features and renders different regions with different qualities without sacrificing perceived visual quality. Foveated rendering research has a history of 31 years and is mainly focused on solving the following three problems. The first is to apply perceptual models of the human visual system into foveated rendering. The second is to render the image with different qualities according to foveation principles. The third is to integrate foveated rendering into existing rendering paradigms to improve rendering performance. In this survey, we review foveated rendering research from 1990 to 2021. We first revisit the visual perceptual models related to foveated rendering. Subsequently, we propose a new foveated rendering taxonomy and then classify and review the research on this basis. Finally, we discuss potential opportunities and open questions in the foveated rendering field. We anticipate that this survey will provide new researchers with a high-level overview of the state of the art in this field, furnish experts with up-to-date information and offer ideas alongside a framework to VR display software and hardware designers and engineers.

Explore related subjects

cs.GR

Keep this discovery

Explore connections, maps & timelines

BibTeX RIS

Lili Wang, Xuehuai Shi, Yi Liu. 2022-11-15. Foveated Rendering: a State-of-the-Art Survey. https://arxiv.org/abs/2211.07969

Cite the original work for its findings. Save a collection to share your selection of sources.

KEEP EXPLORING

Related papers

arXiv2026

Opacity Is Not Just Opacity

Web graphics travel with content across pages and themes, where changing backgrounds can require recoloring and maintenance. Opacity already makes a fixed object's appearance depend on its background, yet is usually understood only as how much the object obscures it. In fact, opacity controls the scaling of the object-background color difference; transparency is only one effect of this relationship. Zero places the output at the background and one at the source color, but difference scaling need not stop at either position. We retain the compositing expression and extend the coefficient domain from $[0,1]$ to the real numbers: negative values reverse the difference, whereas values above one expand it in the same direction. We focus on same-direction expansion for reusing Web graphics across backgrounds. Each object carries a fixed source color and coefficient, while the actual background determines the enhancement direction. Background-adaptive contrast enhancement thus becomes part of the object's compositing properties, reducing the design and maintenance of separate color variants. The implementation reuses the original equation without increasing the per-pixel arithmetic operation count within the same pipeline. Enumerating all 8-bit sRGB source colors on 16 predefined light and dark canvases, a fixed $α=1.1$ increases the contrast ratio in 99.8145% of combinations. Without changing source colors, 4.8346% of all combinations newly reach the $3:1$ contrast threshold. Output validation and timing across three browsers demonstrate implementation in the same WebGL pipeline, with no sustained additional runtime observed.

cs.GR↗

arXiv2026

Constrained Program Generation for 3D Reaction Animation with a 0.8B Model

Visualizing a chemical reaction requires making its molecular changes visible while keeping the animation faithful to the stated chemistry. Equations, structural diagrams and molecular viewers provide complementary descriptions, but assembling an interactive three-dimensional explanation still requires specifying the changes and checking their consistency. We present ChemXRG, a domain-specific language (DSL) framework that addresses this gap by representing a reaction animation as an executable program. Persistent atom identifiers and explicit bond, charge and grouping operations connect the symbolic reaction to the displayed transformation. This shared representation lets generation, verification and rendering operate on the same account of what changes. Given known, atom-mapped reactant and product structures, reaction-grounded constraints fix input-determined facts and restrict action choices; execution checks validate the resulting transformation before geometry and frames are constructed. We implement this paradigm with a reaction-program corpus and ChemQwen, a trained 0.8B DSL generator. Paired and component evaluations show improved compiler acceptance and normalized full-program agreement under input-conditioned constraints, while identifying remaining failures that require execution checks. A public browser application demonstrates the connection from symbolic reaction descriptions to inspectable programs and interactive 3D animations.

cs.GR↗

arXiv2026

NaRPA: Navigation and Rendering Pipeline for Astronautics

This paper presents the applications of scientific ray-tracing in modeling and simulating light transport for space-borne image data generation. A ray-tracing engine, the Navigation and Rendering Pipeline for Astronautics (NaRPA), is introduced as a rendering framework to generate virtual datasets and support simulations for robust navigation pipelines. Sensor and environment models that enable the synthesis of space-to-space and ground-to-space virtual observations are presented. The work demonstrates the capabilities of simulating passive and active vision-based sensors using NaRPA to facilitate the design, testing, and verification of aerospace visual navigation algorithms. Additionally, the paper describes a velocimeter LiDAR model and its statistical validation with experimental data.

cs.GR↗