Modelling Foveated Depth-of-field Blur for Improving Depth Perception in Virtual Reality

This paper presents a technique to incorporate spatial blur effects in virtual reality devices. The considered spatial blur is based on foveation and defocus blur: concepts inspired by the human visual system. The proposed technique can be applied to any head-mounted display as a post-processing step. Our foveated depth-of-field method removes intensity leakage artifacts in the transitory regions and works in real-Time. We verify the usefulness of our technique by conducting a pilot study on depth perception in virtual environments. In the conducted user study, systems integrated with our blur effect provided a better estimation of object depth in the peripheral regions.