Parallel selective rendering of high-fidelity virtual environments

The human visual system (HVS) provides us with our visual sensory input, but while the HVS is good, it is not perfect. If we wish to invoke, in a virtual environment, the same perceptual response in viewers as if they were actually there in the real scene, then only those parts of an environment that are actually attended to by a viewer at any point of time need be calculated at the highest quality. The remainder of the image can be calculated at a much lower quality, and with much less computational expense, without the user being aware of this quality difference. This paper presents a rendering framework which exploits parallel processing and knowledge of the human visual system to provide a means of rendering high-fidelity virtual environments.