Effects of Depth Layer Switching between an Optical See-Through Head-Mounted Display and a Body-Proximate Display

Abstract

Figure 1: Left: Vision of extending the field of view of body-proximate displays such as a smartwatch through an optical see-through head-mounted display with visual information presented at a uniform depth layer. Right: Visualization of the two depth layers (smartwatch and focal distance of the head-mounted display), which leads to the need of accomodation and vergence changes to integrate information accross both displays. ABSTRACTOptical see-through head-mounted displays (OST HMDs) typically display virtual content at a fixed focal distance while users need to integrate this information with real-world information at different depth layers. This problem is pronounced in body-proximate multidisplay systems, such as when an OST HMD is combined with a smartphone or smartwatch. While such joint systems open up a new design space, they also reduce users' ability to integrate visual information. We quantify this cost by presenting the results of an experiment (n=24) that evaluates human performance in a visual search task across an OST HMD and a body-proximate display at 30 cm. The results reveal that task completion time increases significantly by approximately 50% and the error rate increases significantly by approximately 100% compared to visual search on a single depth layer. These results highlight a design trade-off when designing joint OST HMD-body proximate display systems.• Human-centered computing → Empirical studies in HCI.

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