Generating depth of-field effects in virtual reality applications

Computer-generated images without depth-of-field effects always look surreal. A new technique and algorithm are presented which solve the problem of simulating these effects in VR and other real-time applications. The adaptive convolution approach can generate depth-of-field effects in real time using commercially available hardware filters. The picture-processing algorithm proposed can be easily implemented in a visualization pipeline. The final effect can be obtained by iterative filtering with a single hardware convolution filter or with identical 3/spl times/3 filters placed as pipeline stages. The speed of this approach makes it suitable for generating images in real-time applications, particularly virtual reality systems. As a postprocessing technique, it also has the advantage of being easily implemented as a final stage of the visualization pipeline in an existing rendering system.