Vergence and accommodation to multiple-image-plane stereoscopic displays: "real world" responses with practical image-plane separations?

Conventional stereoscopic displays present images on a single focal plane. The resulting mismatch between the stimuli to the eyes' focusing response (accommodation) and to convergence causes fatigue and poor stereo performance. One solution is to distribute image intensity across a number of widely spaced image planes—a technique referred to as depth filtering. Previously, we found this elicits accurate, continuous monocular accommodation responses with image-plane separations as large as 1.1 Diopters (D, the reciprocal of distance in meters), suggesting that a small number of image planes could eliminate vergence-accommodation conflicts over a large range of simulated distances. Evidence exists, however, of systematic differences between accommodation responses to binocular and monocular stimuli when the stimulus to accommodation is degraded, or at an incorrect distance. We examined the minimum image-plane spacing required for accurate accommodation to binocular depth-filtered images. We compared accommodation and vergence responses to changes in depth speci- fied by depth filtering, using image-plane separations of 0.6 to 1.2 D, and equivalent real stimuli. Accommodation responses to real and depth-filtered stimuli were equivalent for image-plane separations of ∼0.6 to 0.9 D, but differed thereafter. We conclude that depth filter- ing can be used to precisely match accommodation and vergence demand in a practical stereoscopic display. © 2012 SPIE and IS&T. (DOI: 10.1117/1.JEI.21.1.011002)