Short Paper: View Dependent Rendering to Simple Parametric Display Surfaces

Computer displays have remained flat and rectangular for the most part. In this paper, we explore parametric display surfaces, which are of arbitrary shape, but with a mapping to a 2D domain for each pixel. The display could have arbitrary curved shapes given by implicit or parametric equations. We present a fast and efficient method to render 3D scenes onto such a display in a perspectively correct manner. Our method tessellates the scene based on the geodesic edge length and a user-defined error threshold. We also modify scene vertices, based on per-vertex ray casting, so that the final image appears correct to a user’s viewpoint. The ray-surface intersection procedure, geodesic length computation and 2D image mapping are assumed to be known for the given surface. We exploit the tessellation hardware of the SM 5.0 GPUs to perform the error checking, polygon splitting, and rendering in a single pass. This brings the performance of our approach closer to rasterization schemes, without needing ray tracing. Our scheme does not interpolate pixels, ensuring high quality. We demonstrate real display prototypes and show scalability of our system using simulated scenarios.