82‐1: Distinguished Paper: Radially Variant Contrast in Virtual Reality Headsets

Abstract

Monocular image quality on virtual reality (VR) head‐mounted displays (HMDs) is radially variant on each eye piece. The virtual image is blurred at the periphery of display field of view primarily by thin lenses stacked on top of the VR display backplane, resulting in image resolution and contrast degradation. Conventional measurement methods adopted from flat‐panel display evaluation do not consider the spatially variant image artifacts by the additional optical components, and thus may not be adequate to assess the image quality in VR. We develop novel test patterns and a new method to measure the radially variant Michelson contrast on VR HMDs. The new method demonstrates efficient VR image quality evaluation using varied interpupillary distance settings.