Fast Generation of Stereoscopic Virtual Environment Display Using P-buffer

This paper is concerned with an efficient generation of stereoscopic views for complex virtual environments by exploiting frame coherence in visibility. The basic idea is to keep visible polygons throughout the rendering process. P-buffer, a buffer of image size, holds the id of the visible polygon for each pixel. This contrasts to the frame buffer and the Z-buffer which hold the color information and the depth information, respectively. For the generation of a consecutive image, the position and the orientation of the visible polygons in the current view are updated according to the viewer's movements, and re-rendered on the current image under the assumption that, when the viewer moves slightly, the visibility of polygons remains unchanged. In the case of stereoscopic views, it may not introduce much difficulty when we render the right(left) image using visible polygons on the (right) image only, The less difference in two images is, the easier the matching becomes in perceiving depth. Some psychophysical experiments have been conducted to support this claim. The computational complexity for generating a fight(left) image from the previous left(right) image is bounded by the size of image space, and accordingly. It is somewhat independent of the complexity of the 3-D scene.