Stacked Omnistereo for virtual reality with six degrees of freedom

Motion parallax is an important cue for depth perception. Rendering it accurately can lead to a more natural and immersive virtual reality (VR) experience. We introduce Stacked Omnistereo, a novel data representation that can render immersive video with six degrees of freedom (DoF). We compare the proposed representation against other depth-based and image-based motion parallax techniques using natural as well as synthetic scenes. We show that the proposed representation can synthesize plausible, view-dependent specular highlights, is compact compared to light fields, and outperforms state-of-the-art VR representations by up to 3 dB when evaluated with 6 DoF head motion.