Comparing disparity based label segregation in augmented and virtual reality

Recent work has shown that overlapping labels in far-field AR environments can be successfully segregated by remapping them to predefined stereoscopic depth layers. User performance was found to be optimal when setting the interlayer disparity to 5--10 arcmin. The current paper investigates to what extent this label segregation technique, label layering, is affected by important perceptual defects in AR such as registration errors and mismatches in accommodation, visual resolution and contrast. A virtual environment matched to a corresponding AR condition but lacking these problems showed a reduction in average response time by 10%. However, the performance pattern for different label layering parameters was not significantly different in the AR and VR environments, showing robustness of this label segregation technique against such perceptual issues.