Gaze-Dependent Ambient Occlusion

In this paper we present a gaze-dependent ambient occlusion technique in which information about the human viewing direction is used to vary accuracy of ambient occlusion computation. The screen region surrounding the observer’s gaze position is rendered with maximum precision, decreasing gradually towards the parafoveal regions. The rendering is speeded up by reducing the number of sampling rays with increasing distance to a gaze point captured by the eye tracker. We conduct experimental evaluation of the perceptual visibility of the ambient occlusion shadows outside observer’s region-of-interest. We also present our GPU-based implementation of the gaze-dependent ambient occlusion system.