Emergent in the field of head mounted display design is a desire to leverage the limitations of the human visual system to reduce the computation, communication, and display workload in power and form-factor constrained systems. Fundamental to this reduced workload is the ability to match display resolution to the acuity of the human visual system, along with a resulting need to follow the gaze of the eye as it moves, a process referred to as foveation. A display that moves its content along with the eye may be called a Foveated Display, though this term is also commonly used to describe displays with non-uniform resolution that attempt to mimic human visual acuity. We therefore recommend a definition for the term Foveated Display that accepts both of these interpretations. Furthermore, we include a simplified model for human visual Acuity Distribution Functions (ADFs) at various levels of visual acuity, across wide fields of view and propose comparison of this ADF with the Resolution Distribution Function of a foveated display for evaluation of its resolution at a particular gaze direction. We also provide a taxonomy to allow the field to meaningfully compare and contrast various aspects of foveated displays in a display and optical technology-agnostic manner.

We present a near-eye augmented reality display with resolution and focal depth dynamically driven by gaze tracking. The display combines a traveling microdisplay relayed off a concave half-mirror magnifier for the high-resolution foveal region, with a wide field-of-view peripheral display using a projector-based Maxwellian-view display whose nodal point is translated to follow the viewer's pupil during eye movements using a traveling holographic optical element. The same optics relay an image of the eye to an infrared camera used for gaze tracking, which in turn drives the foveal display location and peripheral nodal point. Our display supports accommodation cues by varying the focal depth of the microdisplay in the foveal region, and by rendering simulated defocus on the "always in focus" scanning laser projector used for peripheral display. The resulting family of displays significantly improves on the field-of-view, resolution, and form-factor tradeoff present in previous augmented reality designs. We show prototypes supporting 30, 40 and 60 cpd foveal resolution at a net 85° × 78° field of view per eye.

This paper introduces the architecture and initial algorithms for Pixel-Planes 5, a heterogeneous multi-computer designed both for high-speed polygon and sphere rendering (1M Phong-shaded triangles/second) and for supporting algorithm and application research in interactive 3D graphics. Techniques are described for volume rendering at multiple frames per second, font generation directly from conic spline descriptions, and rapid calculation of radiosity form-factors. The hardware consists of up to 32 math-oriented processors, up to 16 rendering units, and a conventional 1280 × 1024-pixel frame buffer, interconnected by a 5 gigabit ring network. Each rendering unit consists of a 128 × 128-pixel array of processors-with-memory with parallel quadratic expression evaluation for every pixel. Implemented on 1.6 micron CMOS chips designed to run at 40MHz, this array has 208 bits/pixel on-chip and is connected to a video RAM memory system that provides 4,096 bits of off-chip memory. Rendering units can be independently reasigned to any part of the screen or to non-screen-oriented computation. As of April 1989, both hardware and software are still under construction, with initial system operation scheduled for fall 1989.