Design of a statically foveated display based on a perceptual-driven approach

Abstract

Foveated display technology has the potential to offer both a large field of view (FOV) and high spatial resolution for head-mounted display (HMD) systems, through allocating the limited resources differently between the region of interest (ROI) and the peripheral region. However, the common method used in the prior studies is based on a dual-resolution dynamic foveation scheme, which is inevitably complex and high cost due to the requirements for multiple display sources, a 2D steering mechanism, and an eye tracking device. We recently proposed a new perceptual-driven approach to design a statically foveated HMD with the goal of offering a wide FOV with nearly imperceptible or minimal degradation of the perceived image resolution within regions where frequent eye movement occurs. Compared to a dynamical dual-resolution foveation approach, it not only minimizes the hardware complexity by eliminating the need for an eyetracker, a scanning mechanism, and multiple display sources, but also offer continuous degradation in resolution to avoid visual artifacts. In this paper, a statically foveated display is designed by carefully controlling the spatial variation of optical magnification of the eyepiece optics, which covers an 80° FOV and achieves a peak resolution of 1.5 arcminutes per pixel. The angular resolution distribution of the prototype design closely matches the theoretical statically foveated scheme described in our previous work with excellent perceived performance. Finally, a foveated display prototype based on the design was experimentally demonstrated with excellent perceived performance matching the designed resolution distribution.