Limits of Peripheral Acuity and Implications for VR System Design

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.

• Machine Perception

• Human-Computer Interaction and Visualization