Dichoptic Foveation
ACM SIGGRAPH 2026
We present dichoptic foveation, a new paradigm to parameterize quality degradation of dichoptically-rendered stimuli in stereoscopic displays like virtual reality. Particularly, we apply Gaussian blur on the stimulus of one eye (right inset images here), while the other eye's stimulus is processed by a simultaneous sharpening routine (left insets). This is guided by our computational model (see heatmaps), which is built on psychophysical data. Dichoptic foveation has direct implications for better quality-to-compute ratios in foveated rendering. Image by kordi_vahle from Pixabay.
Abstract
Interocular differences in visual perception can induce a variety of effects when fused by the brain. For example, prior works have found that carefully crafted binocular differences in local detail can improve contrast. It has also been found that when the frequency content of two stimuli are slightly different, blur suppression leads to a fused percept that is typically dominated by the sharper image. In this paper, we develop a psychophysical framework to measure the perception of natural image stimuli with interocular frequency differences across the visual field. To this end, we study the effect of dichoptic foveation, which we define as the application of blur to one eye and a simultaneous sharpening filter to the other. Stimuli were viewed in a virtual reality (VR) head-mounted display (HMD) and placed at different retinal eccentricities. Study data were scaled to a perceptual just objectionable difference (JOD) scale, and a 4D model was fit to it; our results suggest that interocular frequency differences can be well described by a simple computational model. We applied the model in a realistic VR scenario with free exploration of 360° videos to improve a base foveated rendering system by enhancing high frequency information dichoptically.
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