Flexible Virtual Lenses to Magnify Virtual Environments Locally Without Losing Context Information

We introduce virtual lenses that magnify image regions locally without losing context elements. We developed a unified formalism to design virtual lenses of any closed shape, that can be moved interactively on a screen and within a virtual reality (VR) application in real-time. Moreover, our lenses are versatile: the user can change their parameters to modify the appearance of the magnified image region dynamically. These lenses are suitable for several applications, including virtual tourism and video-surveillance. Our demo showcases an implementation of a lens changing of shape in real-time on a non-VR monitor, followed by a proof-of-concept VR version where the user can move a lens with a VR controller to deform remote textures at different distances. A video introducing both steps of our demo is available at https://youtu.be/mMMdJj67vb4.