How do foveated images perform in visualization?
There are really two related aspects. (a) First, how efficient are they? There are strong reasons to believe that they will drastically reduce the necessary bandwidth for visualization. Our current research is to obtain efficient methods to produce and display foveated images. We are experimenting with a new method based on wavelets. For a java demo, please go to our foveated image server. (b) The second aspect relates to user acceptability. A group at University of Texas Austin has produced a realtime system to track the eye and produce foveated images. They reported [3] that under certain conditions, the user detected only minimal perceptual artifacts while achieving a bandwidth reduction of 94.7% (factor of 18.8). See also.
