Evaluation of Monocular and Binocular Contrast Sensitivity on Virtual Reality Head-Mounted Displays

Virtual reality (VR) creates an immersive experience by rendering a pair of graphical views on a head-mounted display (HMD). However, spatial variation of image quality on VR HMDs can potentially lead to nonuniform monocular views and binocular disparity. In this study, we begin to bridge the gap between monocular and binocular image quality evaluation by developing a WebXR test platform to perform human observer experiments. Specifically, monocular and binocular contrast sensitivity functions (CSFs) are obtained using varied interpupillary distance (IPD) conditions. The result demonstrates that monocular image quality degrades when gazing at the periphery of display field of view (FOV) especially for mismatched IPD settings. Binocular contrast perception is dominated by the monocular view on a VR HMD with superior image quality measured by the contrast.