Discomfort of Visual Perception in Virtual and Mixed Reality Systems

Abstract

The importance of the topic of this paper is caused by the rapid development of virtual, mixed, and augmented reality systems. A problem in designing virtual reality (VR), augmented reality (AR) and mixed reality (MR) systems is the assessment of the visual perception of the result, in particular, the assessment of discomfort caused either by differences in the illumination conditions of objects in the real and virtual worlds or by the conflict of the vergence and accommodation of vision of the device user. The standard optical characteristics, such as aberration, frequency and contrast characteristic, and others are not applicable to evaluating the discomfort of visual perception. On the other hand, the discomfort can be assessed using a real proptotype; however, its fabrication can be labor consuming and expensive. We propose methods for virtual prototyping of visual optical systems that can be used in designing AR, VR, and MR devices for the analysis of discomfort caused, for example, by the vergence–accommodation conflict in virtual and augmented reality systems or by differences in the illumination conditions of real and virtual scene objects in mixed reality systems.