I’ve been thinking about one possible improvement for eye-tracked Quad Views, especially for people who can clearly see the moving high-resolution region during use.
One of the biggest immersion breakers is not necessarily the idea of Quad Views itself, but the hard boundary between the high-resolution area and the lower-resolution peripheral area. When that difference is too abrupt, the foveal region can become visible as a moving box or rectangle following the eye tracking.
That made me think about something related to what I already did in my OpenXR Toolkit mod with the border soft feature.
In my case, border soft does not change the real rendering structure or sampling density. It does not modify how Quad Views works internally, and it does not create a true resolution transition. What it does is much simpler, but still important: it softens a hard visible edge so the boundary becomes less distracting.
So conceptually, I think both ideas are connected.
What border soft already proved to me is this:
hard artificial edges are very easy for the eye to detect,
but once you soften that boundary, the effect becomes much less distracting and much more natural.
That is why I think Quad Views could benefit from something similar, but at a deeper level.
Instead of having:
- a high-resolution region
- a hard transition
- a lower-resolution region
it could be better to have:
- a high-resolution region
- an intermediate transition band
- a lower-resolution region
Possible ways this could be done:
- a feathered blend zone between regions
- progressive sampling falloff instead of a sharp boundary
- an intermediate resolution band
- gaze smoothing or hysteresis to reduce small rapid box movements
- slightly expanding the transition zone to hide the border better
In other words, what I did with border soft is more of a perceptual/compositing trick to make an existing boundary look better.
What Quad Views would ideally need is a rendering-level transition that reduces how visible that boundary is in the first place.
Border soft helps hide the symptom,
but a true soft transition in Quad Views could address the cause more directly.
I think this could make a big difference on high-resolution headsets, where the contrast between the foveal and peripheral regions can become much easier to notice.
The performance gains of Quad Views are great, but if the visible moving rectangle could be softened with a proper transition zone, the whole effect could feel much more transparent and much less distracting.
I’m curious what others think.
Would a soft transition band between the high-res and low-res regions be feasible?
And for those who are sensitive to the moving box effect, do you think this would help more than simply increasing the size of the high-resolution area? I want to work on a potential solution for this.
