A head-mounted eye movement tracking display and its image display method

As a visual image presentation device in virtual reality and telerobotics, the head-mounted display (HMD) is attracting attention. The basic principle of HMD is as follows. Two small displays are arranged in front of the two eyes, and present images with parallax, conveying a stereo feeling to the operator. The number of scan lines of the displays used in these conventional HMDs is generally limited. For that reason, it is difficult to construct a stereo feeling which will present sufficient images to cover the human view field while maintaining resolution, and this is an obstacle in presenting highly realistic images. For solving this problem, an eye-movement tracking type HMD which can present images with a wide view field and high resolution has been proposed. Human vision can observe objects with high resolution only near the gaze point. Paying attention to this visual characteristic, the eye-movement tracking type HMD is developed as a system which presents images of high resolution in a small region in the view-line direction and presents images of low resolution but wide view field in its surroundings, and thus equivalently presents images of wide view field and high resolution. In this paper, we will propose an image presentation scheme for the embodiment of an eye-movement tracking type HMD and will also describe efforts to confirm its appropriateness by experiments with simple images.