Verifocal: a platform for vision correction and accommodation in head-mounted displays

The vergence-accommodation conflict is a fundamental cause of discomfort in today's Virtual and Augmented Reality (VR/AR). We present a novel software platform and hardware for varifocal head-mounted displays (HMDs) to generate consistent accommodation cues and account for the user's prescription. We investigate multiple varifocal optical systems and propose the world's first varifocal mobile HMD based on Alvarez lenses. We also introduce a varifocal rendering pipeline, which corrects for distortion introduced by the optical focus adjustment, approximates retinal blur, incorporates eye tracking and leverages on rendered content to correct noisy eye tracking results. We demonstrate the platform running in compact VR headsets and present initial results in video pass-through AR.