ABSTRACT
This chapter describes omnidirectional stereoscopic projections (OSP) that are used by both immersive camera systems and by rendering software to produce images and movies suitable for viewing in a wide range of immersive displays such as low-cost commodity virtual reality head-mounted display systems. OSPs and related panoramic projections attempt to generate images that encompass most or all of the plenoptic function for a given eye location. The images resulting from OSPs can be reprojected for arbitrary viewing orientations and fields of view by texture mapping OSP images onto a focal surface’s proxy geometry surrounding the camera in a conventional rendering pipeline. The chapter also describes common approaches for omnidirectional projections, their strengths and weaknesses, and methods for their implementation in rendering software. The over-under stereo pair arrangement provides greatest software interoperability since subimages are stored contiguously in memory, but each subimage can also be directly accessed independently, e.g., by functions not explicitly designed for stereoscopic image pairs.
