Patent Application
20210134250
The invention relates to a display system, and particularly to a display system that provides a virtual image display effect.
With the advancement of electronic technology, demands by users has increased for a visual sensory experience that a display device can provide. Therefore, a display technology of so-called virtual reality is proposed.
In the conventional technical field, hardware developers of virtual reality display devices often face the problems of transmission bandwidth insufficiency and/or excessively long computation time by processing units due to high specification display requirements. To solve such problems, the hardware developers can only adopt high specification graphics processing chips and provide high specification data transmission accessories. However, such methods often cause excessively high costs of the display devices and decrease price competitiveness of the products.
The invention provides a display system that reduces a load and computation time of graphic processing of a display image.
The display system of the invention includes an operation device and a display device. The operation device receives status information and a display image, and analyze the display image according to the status information to generate a foveal image, a background image, and positioning information corresponding to the foveal image. The display device is coupled to the operation device, and is configured to detect eyeball status of a user to generate the status information; receive the foveal image, the background image, and the positioning information; and enlarge the background image to generate an enlarged background image and incorporate the foveal image into the enlarged background image according to the positioning information to generate an output image.
Based on the foregoing, the invention divides the display image into the foveal image and the background image through the operation device according to the status information, and perform processing on the foveal image and background image to different extents of refinement.
The display device receives the foveal image, the background image, and the positioning information, and combines the foveal image and background image according to the positioning information to generate the display image. In this way, in both image processing and transmission of relevant information, it is possible to effectively save bandwidth, provide efficiency in processing, and effectively save required power consumption.
Referring to
Herein, note that on the basis that the foveal image F is an image that the user is looking at and is located in a sensitive area of a human eye, the operation device 110 may thus perform more refined and optimized image processing on the foveal image F. The background image P is not an image that the user is looking at and is located in a non-sensitive area of the human eye. Therefore, the operation device 110 may perform coarser image processing on the background image P. Accordingly, a resolution of the foveal image F generated by the operation device 110 may be higher than a resolution of the background image P.
In this embodiment, the operation device 110 may combine the foveal image F, the background image P, and the positioning information I into combination information DP in a form of an image, and transmit the foveal image F, the background image P, and the positioning information I to the display device 120 through transmitting the combination information DP to the display device 120. Herein, the transmission and reception of the combination information DP may be performed through wired or wireless communication.
The operation device 110 may sequentially transmit the foveal image F, the positioning information I, and the background image P as a sequence to decrease a demand for a transmission bandwidth.
On the other hand, the display device 120 receives the combination information DP, and obtains through analysis the foveal image F, the background image P, and the positioning information I in the combination information DP. The display device 120 may enlarge the background image P to obtain an enlarged background image P′. Then, the display device 120 incorporates the foveal image F into the enlarged background image P′ according to the positioning information I to generate the output image DIMG.
The display device 120 may enlarge the background image P according to a dimension of a display panel of the display device 120. In addition, the display device 120 may establish a coordinate system according to the display panel of the display device 120. Therein, the positioning information I corresponds to a coordinate value of a set point SP on the foveal image F.
The display device 120 generates the output image DIMG through superimposing the foveal image F onto the enlarged background image P′, and provides the output image DIMG to the eyeball EYE of the user to generate visual effects.
It can be known from the foregoing description that through refining the foveal image F, the visual effect for the user can be maintained. By coarsening the background image P, the computation time of graphic processing and the bandwidth required for data transmission can be effectively decreased. Therefore, on the premise that the display effect is not reduced, the display system 100 in this embodiment can effectively decrease the bandwidth required for data transmission and decrease hardware requirements for graphic processing.
Incidentally, before performing the transmission of the combination information DP, the operation device 110 may further perform data compression of the combination information DP to further decrease the bandwidth required for the data transmission of the combination information DP.
In the following, reference is made to
In this embodiment, the processing unit 2120 may combine the foveal image F, the background image P, and the positioning information I into combination information DP in a form of an image. In addition, the processing unit 2120 may transmit the combination information DP to a wireless signal transceiver 2111 in the communication interface 2110. Alternatively, the graphics processing unit 2130 may transmit the combination information DP to the display device 220 in a wired manner through a transmission wire in the communication interface 2110.
As for the display device 220, the display device 220 includes an interface circuit 221, an eyeball tracker 2221, a display driver 2222, and a display panel 2223. The interface circuit 221 includes an eyeball information generating circuit 2211, a wireless signal transceiver circuit 2212, and a bridge circuit 2213. The eyeball information generating circuit 2211 is coupled to the eyeball tracker 2221. The eyeball tracker 2221 is configured to track position status of an eyeball of a user to obtain eyeball status of the user. The eyeball information generating circuit 2211 may generate the status information POSE according to the eyeball status of the user. Herein, the eyeball tracker 2221 may track the eyeball applying a manner well known to those having common knowledge in the field, and is not specifically limited. The eyeball information generating circuit 2211 may be implemented with a chip. The eyeball information generating circuit 2211 may also be implemented applying an image signal processor (ISP) known to those skilled in the field, and is not specifically limited.
In addition, the bridge circuit 2213 is coupled to the display driver 2222, and may be coupled to the graphics processing unit 2130 in a wired manner. The bridge circuit 2213 may receive the combination information DP from the graphics processing unit 2130, and forward the combination information DP to the display driver 2222. On the other hand, the bridge circuit 2213 is coupled to the wireless signal transceiver circuit 2212. The wireless signal transceiver circuit 2212 may perform wireless communication with the wireless signal transceiver circuit 2111 to perform data transmission and reception. The bridge circuit 2213 may also receive the combination information DP transmitted from the operation device 210 through the wireless signal transceiver circuit 2212, and forward the combination information DP to the display driver 2222.
The display driver 2222 decodes the combination information DP to obtain the background image P, the foveal image F, and the positioning information I. The display driver 2222 enlarges the background image P to generate an enlarged background image, and incorporates the foveal image F into the enlarged background image according to the positioning information I to generate a display driving signal DSPS. The display driver 2222 transmits the display driving signal DSPS to the display panel 2223, and drives the display panel 2223 to generate an output image DIMG. Moreover, if the combination information DP is compressed information, the display driver 2222 may first perform decompression of the combination information DP.
In this embodiment, the display panel 2223 may be any kind of display panel well known to those skilled in the field, and is not particularly limited.
Herein it is notable that, in this embodiment, when the wired connection between the display device 220 and the operation device 210 is validly formed, the wireless signal transceiver circuit 2212 and the wireless signal transceiver circuit 2111 may be turned off to save power consumption. At this time, regarding data transmission between the display device 220 and the operation device 210, the combination information DP and the status information POSE may be transmitted through the data transmission wire between the display device 220 and the operation device 210. On the other hand, when the wired connection between the display device 220 and the operation device 210 is disconnected, the wireless signal transceiver circuit 2212 and the wireless signal transceiver circuit 2111 may be turned on. The transmission of the combination information DP and the status information POSE between the display device 220 and the operation device 210 may be performed through the wireless signal transceiver circuit 2212 and the wireless signal transceiver circuit 2111.
In this embodiment, the wireless signal transceiver circuit 2212 and the wireless signal transceiver circuit 2111 may perform wireless communication through any wireless communication protocol well known to those skilled in the field, and is not particularly limited.
In the following, reference is made to
Based on the dimension of the display panel, the display driver may set up a coordinate system. After generating the enlarged background image P′, the display driver may read out the foveal image F from the random access memory, superimpose the foveal image F onto the proper position on the enlarged background image P′ according to the positioning information I, and generate the output image DIMG. Herein, the positioning information I may be adopted to indicate a coordinate value of a set point SP on the foveal image F. In this embodiment, the set point SP may be set at any one of four end points of the foveal image F. Alternatively, in other embodiments of the invention, the set point SP may also be set at a geometric center of the foveal image F or another position, and is not particularly limited.
In summary of the foregoing, the invention divides the display image into a foveal image and a background image according to the area that the user is watching, and generates the positioning information according to the position of the foveal image. In the invention, the visual quality can be further maintained for the user through setting the foveal image with a relatively high resolution for, and decreases the bandwidth required for the graphic processing through setting the background image with a relatively low resolution. In this way, the display system of the invention can effectively reduce the workload of the graphics processing unit, decrease the transmission bandwidth required for image information transmission, reduce the required power consumption, and increase the performance of the display system on the premise that the display quality is provided.
This application claims the priority benefit of U.S. Provisional Application No. 62/930,586, filed on Nov. 5, 2019. The entirety of the above-mentioned patent application is hereby incorporated by reference herein and made a part of this specification.
| Number | Date | Country | |
|---|---|---|---|
| 62930586 | Nov 2019 | US |
