Dataset Information

Optimizing virtual reality for all users through gaze-contingent and adaptive focus displays.

ABSTRACT: From the desktop to the laptop to the mobile device, personal computing platforms evolve over time. Moving forward, wearable computing is widely expected to be integral to consumer electronics and beyond. The primary interface between a wearable computer and a user is often a near-eye display. However, current generation near-eye displays suffer from multiple limitations: they are unable to provide fully natural visual cues and comfortable viewing experiences for all users. At their core, many of the issues with near-eye displays are caused by limitations in conventional optics. Current displays cannot reproduce the changes in focus that accompany natural vision, and they cannot support users with uncorrected refractive errors. With two prototype near-eye displays, we show how these issues can be overcome using display modes that adapt to the user via computational optics. By using focus-tunable lenses, mechanically actuated displays, and mobile gaze-tracking technology, these displays can be tailored to correct common refractive errors and provide natural focus cues by dynamically updating the system based on where a user looks in a virtual scene. Indeed, the opportunities afforded by recent advances in computational optics open up the possibility of creating a computing platform in which some users may experience better quality vision in the virtual world than in the real one.

SUBMITTER: Padmanaban N

PROVIDER: S-EPMC5338519 | biostudies-literature | 2017 Feb

REPOSITORIES: biostudies-literature

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Optimizing virtual reality for all users through gaze-contingent and adaptive focus displays.

Padmanaban Nitish N Konrad Robert R Stramer Tal T Cooper Emily A EA Wetzstein Gordon G

Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the United States of America 20170213 9

From the desktop to the laptop to the mobile device, personal computing platforms evolve over time. Moving forward, wearable computing is widely expected to be integral to consumer electronics and beyond. The primary interface between a wearable computer and a user is often a near-eye display. However, current generation near-eye displays suffer from multiple limitations: they are unable to provide fully natural visual cues and comfortable viewing experiences for all users. At their core, many o ...[more]

PMID: 28193871

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Project description:How vision guides gaze in realistic settings has been researched for decades. Human gaze behavior is typically measured in laboratory settings that are well controlled but feature-reduced and movement-constrained, in sharp contrast to real-life gaze control that combines eye, head, and body movements. Previous real-world research has shown environmental factors such as terrain difficulty to affect gaze; however, real-world settings are difficult to control or replicate. Virtual reality (VR) offers the experimental control of a laboratory, yet approximates freedom and visual complexity of the real world (RW). We measured gaze data in 8 healthy young adults during walking in the RW and simulated locomotion in VR. Participants walked along a pre-defined path inside an office building, which included different terrains such as long corridors and flights of stairs. In VR, participants followed the same path in a detailed virtual reconstruction of the building. We devised a novel hybrid control strategy for movement in VR: participants did not actually translate: forward movements were controlled by a hand-held device, rotational movements were executed physically and transferred to the VR. We found significant effects of terrain type (flat corridor, staircase up, and staircase down) on gaze direction, on the spatial spread of gaze direction, and on the angular distribution of gaze-direction changes. The factor world (RW and VR) affected the angular distribution of gaze-direction changes, saccade frequency, and head-centered vertical gaze direction. The latter effect vanished when referencing gaze to a world-fixed coordinate system, and was likely due to specifics of headset placement, which cannot confound any other analyzed measure. Importantly, we did not observe a significant interaction between the factors world and terrain for any of the tested measures. This indicates that differences between terrain types are not modulated by the world. The overall dwell time on navigational markers did not differ between worlds. The similar dependence of gaze behavior on terrain in the RW and in VR indicates that our VR captures real-world constraints remarkably well. High-fidelity VR combined with naturalistic movement control therefore has the potential to narrow the gap between the experimental control of a lab and ecologically valid settings.

Dataset Information

Optimizing virtual reality for all users through gaze-contingent and adaptive focus displays.

Publications

Optimizing virtual reality for all users through gaze-contingent and adaptive focus displays.

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