GPU rendering for tiled multi-projector autostereoscopic display based on chromium

Abstract

In this paper, a GPU-based high-resolution multiview rendering approach (HRMVRA) is presented and incorporated into Chromium, and then a tiled multi-projector autostereoscopic display system (TMPADS) based on HRMVRA is constructed to provide an immersing 3D perception and a compelling sense of presence without the need of glasses for viewers. HRMVRA renders the multiview images in real time in only one pass, though the traditional multiview rendering approaches based on Chromium render the multiviews in multiple passes. The hardware of the autostereoscopic display system consists of a front-projection screen that covers an area of 360×160 square centimeters, twenty four projectors and thirteen computers connected with the gigabit Ethernet. TMPADS is well scalable since both the resolution and the number of the rendered views are configurable. It is shown by the experiments that HRMVRA has more than five times performance of the traditional high-resolution multiview parallax rendering based on Chromium. Most existing single-view OpenGL applications (e.g., some games like Quake III) can run directly on TMPADS without any source-code modification or re-compiling.