A binocular parallel rendering method for VR globes. Issue 9 (1st September 2020)

• Record Type: Journal Article
• Authors: Huang, Wumeng; Chen, Jing; Zhou, Mengyun
• Is Part Of: International journal of digital earth. Volume 13:Issue 9(2020)
• Page Start: 998
• Page End: 1016
• Publication Date: 2020-09-01
• Subjects: VR globes -- virtual globes -- virtual reality -- binocular vision -- parallel rendering; Geographic information systems -- Periodicals; Sustainable development -- Information technology -- Periodicals; Social planning -- Information technology -- Periodicals; 910.285
• DOI: 10.1080/17538947.2019.1620883
• Languages: English
• ISSNs: 1753-8947

Abstract

ABSTRACT: The scene-rendering mechanism based on binocular vision is one of the key techniques for the VR globe to achieve immersion-type visualization of global 3D scenes. However, this special rendering mechanism also requires that the 3D scene is continuously drawn twice within one frame, which significantly affects the rendering efficiency of VR globes. Therefore, we propose a binocular parallel rendering method. This method first improves the current rendering process of VR globes by assigning the rendering tasks for the left and right camera of VR to be processed on different CPU cores, thereby achieving parallel rendering of binocular scenes. Second, due to the problem of inconsistent resolution of binocular scenes caused by different viewpoints for the left and right cameras, we propose a resolution synchronize algorithm. this algorithm conducts real-time synchronization on the resolution of scene in the rendering process and thus avoids the problem of erroneous binocular stereo matching. Finally, we validate the effectiveness of the method in this paper through experiments. The results of experiments indicate that while the method in this paper can ensure the consistency of binocular scene resolution, it can decrease the frame time of VR globes by approximately 27% on average.