Interactive Simulation of the Human Eye Depth of Field and Its Correction by Spectacle Lenses

Masanori Kakimoto(1)    kaki@sgi.co.jp
Tomoaki Tatsukawa(1)
Yukiteru Mukai(1)
Tomoyuki Nishita(2)

(1) SGI Japan, Ltd., Japan
(2)
The University of Tokyo, Japan

These movies were verified using QuickTime 7.1.2.  They could not be played using QuickTime 5.0.2.  Please download the newest free QuickTime player from http://www.apple.com/quicktime/download/win.html or http://www.apple.com/quicktime/download/mac.html to view the movies. 

Per-Vertex Ray Tracing

This movie illustrates how our algorithm for real-time reflection (refraction) works.  The reflection ray from each vertex is traced to find an accurate 3D intersection and the point is guaranteed to be reflected at the vertex.  This is easily applied to real-time double-refraction for lenses. Note that the opening car motion picture is made using Maya; it is NOT done by our technology. 

Correction by a concave lens*

Concave lenses corrects myopia.  Please note that the distant objects appears sharper when looked through the lens. 

Correction by a convex lens*

Convex lenses are used to correct presbyopia.  The newspaper becomes readable with this lens whereas distance objects are much blurred. 

Correction by a progressive lens*

Progressive lenses are designed such that the upper half of the lens become concave and the lower half convex. Actually only a narrow central part of the lower half is effective for correcting presbyopia because of the difficulty of controlling the curvature of the lens surface. 

A blur field for astigmatism*

This movie visualizes an instance of our novel concept "blur field" which covers the viewing volume and keeps the space dependent defocus information in voxels.  The blur field shown as a flock of red ellipses is 'frozen' soon after it appears in the movie, in order for the viewer to roam into the 3D snapshot of the blur field.  In this video, characteristics of an astigmatic eye are described with the blur field. The ellipses are vertically long near the eye but they gradually become circles and then horizontally long as the distance from the eye gets greater.  Please note that the objects are blurred exactly according to their local blur field ellipses.

* These movies were made by recording the real-time interaction operations. We used a capture software and the resulting frame rates appear to be lower than that of the actual interactive operations. The frame rate numbers shown with the opening titles are what have been measured without the capture software.  The window size is 768 x 512, which differs from the size used for the performance measurement in the paper (1024 x 768).