Comparison of Light Field and Conventional Near-Eye AR Displays in Virtual-Real Integration Efficiency

Abstract

Most existing wearable displays for augmented reality (AR) have only one fixed focal plane and hence can easily suffer from vergence-accommodation conflict (VAC). In contrast, light field displays allow users to focus at any depth free of VAC. This paper presents a series of text-based visual search tasks to systematically and quantitatively compare a near-eye light field AR display with a conventional AR display, specifically in regards to how participants wearing such displays would perform on a virtual-real integration task. Task performance is evaluated by task completion rate and accuracy. The results show that the light field AR glasses lead to significantly higher user performance than the conventional AR glasses. In addition, 80% of the participants prefer the light field AR glasses over the conventional AR glasses for visual comfort.