Spotted: Perception of highlight disparity at a distance in consumer head-mounted displays

Trying to learn what differences people can see between stereo pairs, to save rendering time in vr. 

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Perception of highlight disparity at a distance in consumer head-mounted displays
// ACM HPG

Robert Toth, Jon Hasselgren, Tomas Akenine-Möller

Stereo rendering for 3D displays and for virtual reality headsets provide several visual cues, including convergence angle and highlight disparity. The human visual system interprets these cues to estimate surface properties of the displayed environment. Naïve stereo rendering effectively doubles the computational burden of image synthesis, and thus it is desirable to reuse as many computations as possible between the stereo image pair. Computing a single radiance for a point on a surface, to be used when synthesizing both the left and right images, results in the loss of highlight disparity. Our hypothesis is that absence of highlight disparity does not impair perception of surface properties at larger distances.