Battery-constrained power consumption, compute limitations, and high frame rate requirements in head-mounted displays present unique challenges in the drive to present increasingly immersive and comfortable imagery in virtual reality. However, humans are not equally sensitive to all regions of the visual field, and perceptually-optimized rendering techniques are increasingly utilized to address these bottlenecks. Many of these techniques are gaze-contingent and often render reduced detail away from a user's fixation. Such techniques are dependent on spatio-temporally-accurate gaze tracking and can result in obvious visual artifacts when eye tracking is inaccurate. In this work we present a gaze-contingent rendering technique which only requires saccade detection, bypassing the need for highly-accurate eye tracking. In our first experiment, we show that visual acuity is reduced for several hundred milliseconds after a saccade. In our second experiment, we use these results to reduce the rendered image resolution after saccades in a controlled psychophysical setup, and find that observers cannot discriminate between saccade-contingent reduced-resolution rendering and full-resolution rendering. Finally, in our third experiment, we introduce a 90 pixels per degree headset and validate our saccade-contingent rendering method under typical VR viewing conditions.

翻译：头戴式显示器中受电池限制的功耗、计算能力限制以及高帧率需求，为在虚拟现实中呈现日益沉浸且舒适的图像带来了独特挑战。然而，人类视觉系统对所有视野区域的敏感度并非均等，感知优化渲染技术正越来越多地被用于应对这些瓶颈。许多此类技术基于注视点驱动，通常降低用户注视中心以外的渲染细节。这类方法依赖时空精确的眼动追踪，当眼动追踪不准确时会产生明显的视觉伪影。本研究提出一种仅需检测扫视行为的注视点驱动渲染技术，无需高精度眼动追踪。实验一表明，扫视后数百毫秒内视觉敏锐度会下降。实验二基于此发现，在受控心理物理实验环境中降低扫视后的渲染图像分辨率，结果显示观测者无法区分扫视触发的低分辨率渲染与全分辨率渲染。实验三中，我们引入一款每视场角90像素的头戴式设备，在典型虚拟现实观看条件下验证了扫视触发渲染方法的有效性。