David Morris Hoffman
David M. Hoffman graduated from the University of California San Diego with a degree in Bioengineering and received his PhD in Vision Science from the School of Optometry at the University of California Berkeley. He has since worked with several companies on improving displayed image quality through identifying, characterizing, and mitigating degradation and distortion sources throughout the software and hardware acquisition and display pipeline. Since 2017, he is an applied vision researcher at Google working on creating the display subsystem and imaging pipelines that facilitate terrific head worn display experiences. A major part of this research is discovering how the limits of the visual system dictate which technological advances will have the strongest perceptual impact. He is an associate editor of the Journal of Society for Information Display and chairs the applied vision subcommittee of SID Display Week.
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Effect of latency on simulator sickness in smartphone virtual reality
Nikhil Balram
Journal of the Society for Information Display, vol. 27 (2021), pp. 561-572
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Virtual reality (VR) technologies have experienced rapid development in recent years, leading to low-cost consumer smartphone VR systems (with 3DoF tracking). One issue with the smartphone VR systems, which rely on existing generic displays, is simulator sickness, which arises due to factors that induce sensory conflicts, especially related to visual–vestibular conflict. Display update latency with respect to head position is one of the most widely implicated factors for simulator sickness. However, studies of the effects of latency on simulator sickness have given inconsistent results. Moreover, these studies were done on systems with latencies much higher than current smartphone VR systems. Therefore, it is hard to generalize those results to today's VR systems. To address this, we present in this paper a study on the effect of latency on simulator sickness for latency levels around 20 ms. We present a systematic evaluation of simulator sickness in smartphone VR, testing for a difference between conditions with latencies of 18 and 28 ms, on a task of natural game playing in smartphone VR. We noted differences between individuals in their reported simulator sickness for the two latency conditions but no sample-wide significant difference.
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Analysis of 3D Eyebox in Augmented and Virtual Reality Optics
Nikhil Balram
Society of information display, Society of information display (2019)
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The eyebox volume is a key design parameter in the optical design of augmented and virtual reality optics. The extent of the eyebox volume determines the experience of a user in seeing the entire
virtual magnified image. Furthermore, a 3D description of eyebox facilitates the design of augmented and virtual reality products for a population of users. We define 3D eyebox and discuss visualization approaches to communicate it within interdisciplinary product design groups focused on research and development of augmented and virtual reality optics.
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Limits of Peripheral Acuity and Implications for VR System Design
Zoe Meraz
Journal of Society for Information Display (2018), pp. 13
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At different locations in the visual field, we measured the visual system’s sensitivity to a number of artifacts that can be introduced in near-eye display systems. One study examined the threshold level of downsampling that an image can sustain at different position in the retina and found that temporally stable approaches, both blurred and aliased, were much less noticeable than temporally volatile approaches. Also, boundaries between zones of different resolution had low visibility in the periphery. We also examined the minimum duration needed for the visual system to detect a low resolution region in an actively tracked system and found that low resolution images presented for less than 40ms before being replaced with a high resolution image are unlikely to be visibly degraded. We also found that the visual system shows a rapid fall-off in its ability to detect chromatic aberration in the periphery. These findings can inform the design on high performance and computationally efficient near-eye display systems.
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Sensitivity to peripheral artifacts in VR display systems
Zoe Meraz
Proceedings of the Society for information display, Society for Information Display (2018), pp. 4
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We evaluated the visual system’s sensitivity to different classes of image impairment that are closely associated with rendering in VR display systems. Even in the far periphery, the visual system was highly sensitive to volatile downsampling solutions. Temporally stable downsampling in the periphery was generally acceptable even with sample spacing up to half a degree.
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