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High-quality head mounted displays are becoming available in the consumer space. These displays provide an immersive gaming experience by filling the wearer's field of view. To achieve immersion with low cost, a commodity display panel is placed a short distance in front of each eye, and wide-angle optics are used to bring the image into focus. However, these optics introduce spatial and chromatic distortion into the image seen by the viewer. As a result, the images to be displayed must be pre-warped to cancel this distortion. This correction can be performed by warping the image in a postprocessing step, by warping the scene geometry before rendering, or by modeling corrective optics in the virtual camera.Here, we examine the image quality and performance of several correction methods. Though image warping with a bilinear filter is common [Antonov et al. 2013], we find that bicubic filtering yields improved image quality with minimal performance impact. We also propose a new method for correcting chromatic distortion by warping the image using distortion meshes, and we propose a method for correcting spatial and chromatic distortion accurately in-camera.

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Recently, realtime ray tracing has been developed to the point where it is becoming a possible alternative to the current rasterization approach for interactive 3D graphics. With the availability of a first prototype graphics board purely based on ray tracing, we have all the ingredients for a new generation of 3D graphics technology that could have significant consequences for computer gaming. However, hardly any research has been looking at how games could benefit from ray tracing.In this paper we describe our experience with two games: The adaption of a well known ego-shooter to a ray tracing engine and the development of a new game especially designed to exploit the features of ray tracing. We discuss how existing features of games can be implemented in a ray tracing context and what new effects and improvements are enabled by using ray tracing. Both projects show how ray tracing allows for highly realistic images while it greatly simplifies content creation.

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