Rivalry and Interference with a Head Mounted Display
 		    
Abstract: Perceptual factors that effect monocular, transparent (a.k.a “see-thru”) head mounted displays include binocular rivalry, visual interference, and depth of focus. We report the results of an experiment designed to evaluate the effects of these factors on user performance in a table look-up task.

Two backgrounds were used. A dynamic moving background was provided by a large screen TV while an untidy bookshelf was used to provide a complex static background. With the TV background large effects were found attributable to both rivalry and visual interference. These two effects were roughly additive. Smaller effects were found with the bookshelf. In conclusion we suggest that monocular transparent HMDs may be unsuitable for use in visually dynamic environments. However when backgrounds are relatively static, having a transparent display may be preferable to having an opaque display.

Project: This work has been carried out mostly in the computer science department at the University of New Hampshire and also as part of the application research project ``multi-disciplanary visualization'' in the VRVis Research Center, Area 3, Project 2, which is funded by an Austrian governmental research project called Kplus and AVL.
Papers:
Rivalry and Interference with a Head Mounted Display, by Robert S. Laramee and Colin Ware in ACM Transactions on Computer-Human Interaction (TOCHI), Vol. 9, No. 3, September 2002, pages 238-251, PDF format
Rivalry and Interference with a Head Mounted Display, by Robert S. Laramee and Colin Ware, VRVis technical report TR-VRVIS-2002-005, PDF format
A related paper: Visual Interference with a Transparent Head Mounted Display by Robert S. Laramee and Colin Ware in CHI 2001 Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems, Extended Abstracts, pages 323-324, 31 March - 5 April, Seattle, Washington, PDF format
Figures:

The head mounted display we worked with looked like this. We removed one eye piece (the right eye) in order to make it monocular.

This figure shows text at one focal distance, and background objects at three different simulated focal distances. The fruit which is closer to the focal distance of the text makes the text harder to read whereas the text in front of the tree is easier to read.

Results:

Average response time versus each of 9 HMD configurations. The configurations are labeled with (1) the number of viewing eyes (2) the HMD opacity (or transparency) and (3) the type of background (bookshelf or TV) e.g. binocular, opaque, bookshelf

This page is maintained by Robert S. Laramee. 
In case of questions, comments, etc., please send email mail to Laramee "at" VRVis.at.