Visual comfort of binocular and 3-D displays

A major factor that seriously hampers the use of binocular displays is visual discomfort. We have experimentally determined the level of (dis)comfort experienced by 24 subjects for short presentations of a wide range of binocular image imperfections. The image manipulations are representative for commonly encountered optical errors (spatial distortions: shifts, magnification, rotation, keystone), imperfect filters (photometric asymmetries: luminance, color, contrast, crosstalk), and stereoscopic disparities. The results show that nearly all binocular aymmetries seriously affect the visual comfort if present in a large enough amount. Threshold values for the onset of discomfort are estimated from the data. The database collected in the study should allow a more accurate prediction of visual comfort from the specification of a binocular viewing system than so far is possible.