Cg Programming/Unity/Projection for Virtual Reality

This tutorial discusses off-axis perspective projection in Unity. It is based on. No shader programming is required since only the view matrix and the projection matrix are changed, which is implemented in C#.

The main application of off-axis perspective projection are virtual reality environments such as the CAVE shown in the photo or so-called fish tank VR systems. Usually, the user's head position is tracked and the perspective projection for each display is computed for a camera at the tracked position such that the user experiences the illusion of looking through a window into a three-dimensional world instead of looking at a flat display.



Off-Axis vs. On-Axis Perspective Projection
On-axis projection refers to camera positions that are on the symmetry axis of the view plane, i.e. the axis through the center of the view plane and orthogonal to it. This case is discussed in.

In virtual reality environments, however, the virtual camera often follows the tracked position of the user's head in order to create parallax effects and thus a more compelling illusion of a three-dimensional world. Since the tracked head position is not limited to the symmetry axis of the view plane, on-axis projection is not sufficient for most virtual reality environments.

Off-axis perspective projection addresses this issue by allowing for arbitrary camera positions. While some low-level graphics APIs (e.g. older versions of OpenGL) supported off-axis projection, they had much better support for on-axis projection since this was the more common case. Similarly, many high-level tools (e.g. Unity) support off-axis projection but provide much better support for on-axis projection, i.e. you can specify any on-axis projection with some mouse clicks but you need to write a script to implement off-axis projection.

Computing Off-Axis Perspective Projection
Off-axis perspective projection requires a different view matrix and a different projection matrix than on-axis perspective projection. For the computation of the on-axis view matrix, a specified view direction is rotated onto the z axis as described in. The only difference for an off-axis view matrix is that this “view direction” is computed as the orthogonal direction to the specified view plane, i.e. the surface normal vector of the view plane.

The off-axis projection matrix has to be changed since the edges of the view plane are no longer symmetric around the intersection point with the (technical) “view direction.” Thus, the four distances to the edges have to be computed and put into a suitable projection matrix. For details, see the description by Robert Kooima in his publication “Generalized Perspective Projection”. The next section presents an implementation of this technique in Unity.

Camera Script
The following script is based on the code in Robert Kooima's publication. There are very few implementation differences. One is that, in Unity, the view plane is more easily specified as a built-in Quad object, which has corners at (±0.5, ±0.5, 0) in object coordinates. Furthermore, the original code was written for a right-handed coordinate system while Unity uses a left-handed coordinate system; thus, the result of all cross products has to be multiplied with -1. Also, the code here takes into account that the camera might be seeing the back-face of the Quad object.

Another difference is that the rotation of the camera's GameObject and the parameter  are used by Unity for view frustum culling; therefore, the script should set those values to appropriate values. (These values have no meaning for the computation of the matrices.) Unfortunately, this might cause problems if other scripts (namely the script that sets the tracked head position) are also setting the camera rotation. Therefore, this estimation can be deactivated with the variable  (at the risk of incorrect view frustum culling by Unity).

If the parameter  is set to , the script sets the distance of the near clip plane to the distance between the camera and the view plane plus the value of. However, if that value is less than  then it is set to. This functionality is particularly useful when using the script to render mirrors as described in. should then be a negative number that is as close to 0 as possible while avoiding artifacts.

To use this script, choose Create > C# Script in the Project Window, name the script "ObliqueProjectionToQuad", double-click the new script to edit it, and copy & paste the code from above into it. Then attach the script to your main camera (drag it from the Project Window over the camera object in the Hierarchy Window). Furthermore, create a Quad object (GameObject > 3D Object > Quad in the main menu) and place it into the virtual scene to define the view plane. Deactivate the Mesh Renderer of the Quad in the Inspector Window to make it invisible (it is only a placeholder). Select the camera object and drag the Quad object to Projection Screen in the Inspector. The script will be active when the game is started. Add the line as described in the code to make the script also run in the editor.

Note that there are probably some parts of Unity that ignore the new projection matrix and that therefore are unusable in combination with this script.

Stereoscopic Cameras
If the positions of the left and right camera for a stereoscopic display are known, the script can be applied to each of the cameras separately. However, if a Unity  – let's call it   – is used for stereo rendering, the position in   specifies the midpoint between the left and right camera. In this case, the position of the left camera may be obtained (in a 4-dimensional vector) with  and the position of the right camera may be obtained correspondingly with. These positions may then be used to set up two separate cameras for the off-axis projection.

In some applications of off-axis projection (e.g. mirrors, portals, or magic lenses), the off-axis cameras might render into render textures, which are then used to texture surfaces. In the case of stereo rendering, there are usually two render textures (one for each eye). Thus, texturing with the resulting render textures usually has to use the correct render texture. To this end, Unity provides the built-in shader variable  which is 0 for the left eye and 1 for the right eye. For example, a shader might read a color  from the render texture for the left eye and a color   from the render texture for the right eye. Then the shader expression  computes the correct color when using the render textures for stereo rendering. Complete shader code for this approach is included in.

Summary
In this tutorial, we have looked at:
 * uses of off-axis perspective projection and differences to on-axis perspective projection
 * the computation of view and projection matrices for off-axis perspective projection
 * an implementation of this computation and its limitations in Unity