PixelView: A View-Independent Graphics Rendering Architecture

Abstract

We present a new computer graphics rendering architecture that allows all possible views to be extracted from a single traversal of a scene description. It supports a wide range of rendering primitives, including polygonal meshes, higher-order surface primitives (e.g. spheres, cylinders, and parametric patches), point-based models, and image-based representations. To demonstrate our concept, we have implemented a hardware prototype that includes a 4D, z-buffered frame-buffer supporting dynamic view selection at the time of raster scan-out. As a result, our implementation supports extremely low display-update latency. The PixelView architecture also supports rendering of the same scene for multiple eyes, which provides immediate benefits for stereo viewing methods like those used in today s virtual environments, particularly when there are multiple participants. In the future, view-independent graphics rendering hardware will also be essential to support the multitude of viewpoints required for real-time autostereoscopic and holographic display devices.