Geometry-based methods for general non-planar perspective projections on curved displays

Abstract

Curved monitors are getting more and more popular nowadays, due to the immersive sensation they provide to users in front of planar monitors. The display in curved monitors is cylindrical surfaces with significant curvatures, which must be taken into account for an accurate projection of the rendered scene. In this paper, we propose new geometry-based methods for nonlinear projections over cylindrical surfaces (corresponding to the geometry of the curved monitor displays) instead of the traditional planar projections, which produce incorrect results on this kind of screens. The proposed methods allow accurate projections on curved screens, even in the case of non-symmetric view frustum, which is the typical view volume obtained either when stereoscopic techniques are used for creating the illusion of depth or when head-tracking is used and the projection equations must be adapted to the relative position of the user eyes. The proposed methods are designed to be implemented on modern programmable GPUs, and the performance evaluation results show that they easily achieve interactive refresh rates even with complex scenes, while they do not significantly reduce the system performance with respect to the case of planar projection.