Level of motion in virtual reality

Abstract

Our paper presents an optimization technique which modulates the computation complexity of the animation in virtual reality (VR). As this technique is based on approaches commonly used in the domain of LOD, we call it LOmD (Level of motion Detail). We extend the classical LOD mechanism based on geometry removal according to observer's distance from a target object, velocity of the model, and position of the model in the periphery of the visual field. The LOmD technique is based on the idea that our visual system is not able to recognize differences in the quality of motions produced by different animation techniques (e.g. simple linear interpolation vs. physically based simulation) under different visual conditions (e.g. distance or eccentricity). Varying the motion detail we can balance the workload of VR system in such a way that the only motions important for the user's view are refined using more complex simulation whereas other motions are linearly interpolated to quarantee the motion continuity. In order to achieve automatic behavior of LOmD mechanism we designed the visual acuity model based on visual perception which links the viewing conditions to the appropriate level of motion detail. The proposed method has been tested on implementation of a simple VR model. The results are presented at the section 5 of the paper.