Perception of Highlight Disparity at a Distance in Consumer Head-Mounted Displays

Stereo rendering for 3D displays and for virtual reality headsets provide several visual cues, including convergence angle and high- light disparity. The human visual system interprets these cues to estimate surface properties of the displayed environment. Naïve stereo rendering effectively doubles the computational burden of image synthesis, and thus it is desirable to reuse as many computa- tions as possible between the stereo image pair. Computing a single radiance for a point on a surface, to be used when synthesizing both the left and right images, results in the loss of highlight disparity. Our hypothesis is that absence of highlight disparity does not impair perception of surface properties at larger distances. This is due to an ever decreasing angular difference between the surface and the two view points as distance to the surface is increased. The effect is exacerbated by the limited resolution of consumer head-mounted displays. We verify this hypothesis with a user study and provide rendering guidelines to leverage our findings.