ViP-Fluid: Visual Perception Driven Method for VR Fluid Rendering

The demand for fluid simulation and rendering in virtual reality (VR) is increasing. However, achieving high visual quality while maintaining real-time efficiency remains a challenge. Traditional foveated rendering methods balance the simulation quality in the foveated region but neglect the physical realism in the peripheral areas, and fail to account for the perceptual degradation caused by frame rate fluctuations during adaptive updates. To address these challenges, we propose a novel visual perception driven fluid rendering method ViP-Fluid, which further enhances rendering quality while balancing efficiency. Our approach employs a spatiotemporal saliency model for multi-granularity simulation and rendering of Lagrangian fluid systems, and introduces a Perception Threshold for Physical Process Elapsing (PTPE) metric, which guides our temporal acceleration strategy. Through a series of objective experiments, we demonstrate the advantages of our method in rendering quality and performance efficiency. ViP-Fluid demonstrates superior metrics not only in the foveated region but also in the salient and overall regions, achieving up to 2.15 times speed-up compared to the high-resolution Position Based Fluids (PBF) benchmark. Subsequent user experiments further validate the visual perception advantages of ViP-Fluid over both traditional and state-of-the-art methods, confirming the spatiotemporal fidelity of our acceleration strategy as well as a user preference for our approach.