Real-Time Analytic Antialiased Text for 3-D Environments

Text is a crucial component of 3-D environments and virtual worlds for user interfaces and wayfinding. Implementing text using standard antialiased texture mapping leads to blurry and illegible writing which hinders usability and navigation. While super-sampling removes some of these artifacts, distracting artifacts can still impede legibility, especially for recent high-resolution head-mounted displays. We propose an analytic antialiasing technique that efficiently computes the coverage of text glyphs, over pixel footprints, designed to run at real-time rates. It decomposes glyphs into piecewise-biquadratics and trapezoids that can be quickly area-integrated over a pixel footprint to provide crisp legible antialiased text, even when mapped onto an arbitrary surface in a 3-D virtual environment.