Region warping in a virtual reality system with priority rendering

The ultimate aim of virtual reality is to present the user with an illusion of reality within a virtual environment. Visual artefacts that appear in a virtual reality system’s computer generated graphics can easily destroy this artificial sense of reality. Therefore in order to maintain an illusion of reality, it is essential to eliminate or hide such visual artefacts from the user. This paper investigates the implementation of region warping, a methodology devised for the purpose of masking scene tearing artefacts. These scene tearing artefacts are a side effect from implementing large object segmentation together with a prioritized rendering technique, which was developed for use in conjunction with a specialized virtual reality graphics display controller, known as the Address Recalculation Pipeline. Region warping introduces slight distortions in a scene as a result of compensating for such tearing artefacts. This paper describes the basis for region warping and discusses the results of experiments that were conducted using this warping technique.