Effects of simple HMD operations on primary visual tasks

Abstract

Helmet-mounted displays (HMDs) offer the distinct advantage of wearable computing while accomplishing a variety of physical tasks, such as piloting an aircraft, navigating difficult or unfamiliar terrain, performing surgery, etc. However, problems can arise involving the HMD eyepieces, such that they may either block portions of the far visual field, draw attention away from it, or both. In the present experiments, placement of a monocular HMD eyepiece in the visual field was manipulated to examine its effects on dynamic visual search performance in the far-field environment. In Experiment 1, a pre-attentive task was presented on the HMD to investigate possible dual-task decrements. In Experiment 2, either an endogenous (arrow) or exogenous (circle) cue was presented on the HMD to guide visual search to the location of the target. The results from Experiment 1 show that only one of three participants was able to perform the pre-attentive task on the HMD without harming primary task performance and that for only this participant, eyepiece placement altered dual-task performance. The results from Experiment 2 show that both endogenous and exogenous visual search cues were effective at reducing response times in both eyepiece positions.