Research

Addressing vergence-accommodation conflict in head-mounted displays (HMDs) requires resolving two interrelated problems. First, the hardware must support viewing sharp imagery over the full accommodation range of the user. Second, HMDs should accurately reproduce retinal defocus blur to correctly drive accommodation. A multitude of accommodation-supporting HMDs have been proposed, with three architectures receiving particular attention: varifocal, multifocal, and light field displays. These designs all extend depth of focus, but rely on computationally expensive rendering and optimization algorithms to reproduce accurate defocus blur (often limiting content complexity and interactive applications). To date, no unified framework has been proposed to support driving these emerging HMDs using commodity content. In this paper, we introduce DeepFocus, a generic, end-to-end convolutional neural network designed to efficiently solve the full range of computational tasks for accommodation-supporting HMDs. This network is demonstrated to accurately synthesize defocus blur, focal stacks, multilayer decompositions, and multiview imagery using only commonly available RGB-D images, enabling real-time, near-correct depictions of retinal blur with a broad set of accommodation-supporting HMDs.

Click to Download Supplementary Materials