BACKGROUND OF THE INVENTION

Field of the Invention

The present invention relates to an image rendering method and apparatus.

Description of the Prior Art

The “background” description provided herein is for the purpose of generally presenting the context of the disclosure. Work of the presently named inventors, to the extent it is described in this background section, as well as aspects of the description which may not otherwise qualify as prior art at the time of filing, are neither expressly or impliedly admitted as prior art against the present invention.

Conventional videogame consoles and other computing devices that display 3D graphics internally represent 3-D objects as a mesh of polygons, and typically triangles.

To render the object on a screen that is comprised of pixels, the mesh representation must be converted into a corresponding set of pixels.

This is typically done by defining a position, orientation, and field-of-view of a virtual camera (i.e. defining what part of the mesh will be visible the image), and then identifying which triangles of the mesh correspond to which pixels in the image, in a process called rasterisation; any texture associated with a respective triangle can then be applied to the identified pixels in the image.

The process of rasterisation assumes that all triangles and all pixels are of equal value within the final image, but typically this is not the case; the user's gaze may not encompass all of the image, their attention may be focused on a particular point of interest within the image, and/or the image may encompass a sufficient field-of-view of the user that parts of the image are projected onto the area of the retina outside the fovea, and so are not perceived with similar clarity to the foveated region.

Recognising this, it is possible to perform rasterization on a per-pixel level for the part of the image expected to be in the fovea region, whilst performing rasterization on only a subset of pixels in the part of the image outside the fovea region, effectively reducing the resolution and associated computational cost for those outer regions. Such an approach is known as foveated rendering.

However, there is still scope to improve such a technique further.

The present invention seeks to address or mitigate this need.

SUMMARY OF THE INVENTION

In a first aspect, an image rendering method is provided.

In another aspect, an entertainment device is provided.

In another aspect, a system is provided.

Further respective aspects and features of the invention are defined in the appended claims.

