Improving Depth Perception in Immersive Media Devices by Addressing Vergence-Accommodation Conflict.

Recently, immersive media devices have seen a boost in popularity. However, many problems still remain. Depth perception is a crucial part of how humans behave and interact with their environment. Convergence and accommodation are two physiological mechanisms that provide important depth cues. However, when humans are immersed in virtual environments, they experience a mismatch between these cues. This mismatch causes users to feel discomfort while also hindering their ability to fully perceive object distances. To address the conflict, we have developed a technique that encompasses inverse blurring into immersive media devices. For the inverse blurring, we utilize the classical Wiener deconvolution approach by proposing a novel technique that is applied without the need for an eye-tracker and implemented in a commercial immersive media device. The technique's ability to compensate for the vergence-accommodation conflict was verified through two user studies aimed at reaching and spatial awareness, respectively. The two studies yielded a statistically significant 36% and 48% error reduction in user performance to estimate distances, respectively. Overall, the work done demonstrates how visual stimuli can be modified to allow users to achieve a more natural perception and interaction with the virtual environment.

Mitigating Cybersickness in Virtual Reality Systems through Foveated Depth-of-Field Blur.

Cybersickness is one of the major roadblocks in the widespread adoption of mixed reality devices. Prolonged exposure to these devices, especially virtual reality devices, can cause users to feel discomfort and nausea, spoiling the immersive experience. Incorporating spatial blur in stereoscopic 3D stimuli has shown to reduce cybersickness. In this paper, we develop a technique to incorporate spatial blur in VR systems inspired by the human physiological system. The technique makes use of concepts from foveated imaging and depth-of-field. The developed technique can be applied to any eye tracker equipped VR system as a post-processing step to provide an artifact-free scene. We verify the usefulness of the proposed system by conducting a user study on cybersickness evaluation. We used a custom-built rollercoaster VR environment developed in Unity and an HTC Vive Pro Eye headset to interact with the user. A Simulator Sickness Questionnaire was used to measure the induced sickness while gaze and heart rate data were recorded for quantitative analysis. The experimental analysis highlighted the aptness of our foveated depth-of-field effect in reducing cybersickness in virtual environments by reducing the sickness scores by approximately 66%.