PBVR: Physically Based Rendering in Virtual Reality

Virtual Reality (VR) is a rapidly growing domain that requires high-fidelity graphics for immersion. To understand and improve the VR architecture, an open-source, end-to-end platform for VR research was recently proposed. However, studying the stereo rendering aspect of VR applications remains challenging due to the lack of infrastructure. In this work, we augment the aforementioned open- source platform, ILLIXR, by integrating a high-end, physically based 3D rendering engine, Filament. This upgrade, named PBVR, enables developers to render high-quality graphics in a completely open-source VR platform. As a case study, we leverage our proposed PBVR to look into gaze-tracked foveated rendering and profile three different scenes. We show that a handful of renderpasses consume the most time and that readily available foveated rendering solutions, such as Variable Rate Shading, might not provide significant advantages. Moreover, our results reveal that eye tracking can incur a significant overhead on the graphics processing unit (GPU)