Rendering Accommodation Effects in Virtual Reality Applications

Abstract The human eye has a limited depth of field. The blurred retinal images of the objects that we observe, are the stimuli for accommodation. This mechanism is in great measure responsible for our perception of distances. The depth of field effects must be taken into account in order to generate more realistic images, closely approximating the scenes seen by the real human observer. The lack of those effects causes the surreal appearance of generated images. This paper proposes a solution to the problem of simulating accommodation effects in virtual reality applications and a new technique for generating depth of field effects, which takes into account optical properties of the human eye (until now no such solution was proposed in the literature). The proposed algorithm is fast and suitable for the generation of images in the virtual reality and other real-time applications.