Visible Surface Ray-Tracing of Stereoscopic Images

Abstract

Ray-tracing is a well-known method for producing realistic images. If we wish to view a ray-traced image stereoscopically, we must create two distinct views of the image: a left-eye view and a right-eye view. The most straight-forward way to do this is to ray-trace both views, doubling the required work for a single perspective image. We have developed a reprojection algorithm that produces stereoscopic images efficiently with little degradation in image quality. In this paper, we derive the necessary stereoscopic separation technique required to transform a ray-traced left-eye view into an inferred right-eye view. Minor changes in the technique needed to expand from single to multiple rays per pixel are noted. Finally, results from evaluating several random scenes are given, which indicate that the second view in a stereo image can be computed with less than 16 percent of the effort of computing the first.