Relationship between parallax and spatial resolution on visual comfort of an autostereoscopic display

Abstract

A primary reason for visual discomfort caused by viewing 3D contents in autostereoscopic displays is the conflict between accommodation and convergence. Parallax directly affects the degree of conflict. In this paper, three factors are investigated—parallax magnitude, changing parallax, and spatial resolution—which are supposed to exert substantial influence upon visual comfort. The aforementioned three factors are integrated into stereoscopic sequences generated by software. With the data on the subjective evaluation of comfort from the viewers, statistical method is used to obtain both the main effects and interactions among the three factors. According to the experimental results, changing parallax might play a more crucial role in visual comfort than parallax magnitude. Spatial resolution might alleviate the negative effects in which changing parallax brings about. The experiment indicates that parallax for autostereoscopic displays should be within 50′ in consideration of comfort.