Background
Bublr is an innovative virtual meeting space designed to make collaboration and social interaction more natural and intuitive. The platform represents users with live video avatars that can freely explore 3D spaces in real-time and connect with others to meet, work and play.
It’s crucial for a successful metaverse experience that the images should look as natural as possible. Unfortunately, the linear perspective geometry used to render most 3D spaces creates unnatural-looking distortions, especially in wide fields of view.
This problem is especially severe when it comes to representing human faces. We might not notice or care if a desk looks a bit stretched, but when it’s our own face or that of a colleague, then we do.
Mission
Correcting the non-natural-looking distortion caused by a wide field of view.
Answer
We, Bublr, reached out to Fovotec which developed a process that bypasses the normal linear perspective calculations that standard 3D engines use and replaces them with a novel, patent-protected set of calculations based on the structure of human vision.
In practice, this means that a version of Bublr running with Fovorender can show much wider fields of view—which improves interaction and navigation—while keeping the natural appearance of objects—including the faces of the avatars themselves.
Bublr and Fovotec are now working together on developing a FovoRender version of the Bublr platform in the BabylonJS rendering engine and we hope to share more results soon.
Proof of concept images follows showing some of the Bublr 3D assets running within our Unreal 4.27 FovoRender integration at various fields of view from a standard 90-degree horizontal up to an extreme 150 degrees.
In each set of comparisons, the faces of the avatars will be more distorted and the center of the 3D space will feel smaller and further away in the linear view compared to the FovoRender version, where both the faces and the 3D space will have a far more natural experience.
Testing
Limitation
The main downside of the Fovotec solution is that their technique is based on the 3D distortion of the 3D assets. To do so they need to tessellate the existing 3D items, which increases the scene file size and the rendering time.
Next steps
I am currently exploring of re-writing the default linear projection of Babylon.js engine with a corrected projection system. This would not require denser geometry.
Work in progress