FOLAR: A FOggy-LAser Rendering Method for Interaction in Virtual Reality

Abstract: Current commercial Virtual Reality (VR) headsets give viewers immersion in virtual space with stereoscopic graphics and positional tracking. Developers can create VR applications in a working pipeline similar to creating 3D games using game engines. However, the characteristics of VR headsets give disadvantages to the rendering technique particle system with billboard sprites. In our study, we propose a rendering technique called FOggy-LAser Rendering method (FOLAR), which renders realistic laser in fog on billboard sprites. With this method, we can compensate for the disadvantages of using particle systems and still render the graphics in interactive performance for VR. We studied the characteristics of this method by performance benchmarks and comparing the rendered result to a baseline ray-casting method. User study and image similarity metrics are involved in the comparison study. As a result, we observed a satisfying performance and a similar rendering result compared to ray-casting. However, the user study still shows a significant difference in the rendered result between methods. These results imply that FOLAR is an acceptable method for its performance and ness in the rendered result, but still have inevitable trade-offs‌‌‌ in the graphics.