Development of a dichoptic foveal/peripheral head-mounted display with partial binocular overlap

Previous foveal/peripheral display systems have typically combined the foveal and peripheral views optically, in a single eye, in order to provide simultaneously both high resolution and wide field of view from a limited number of pixels. While quite effective, this approach can lead to cumbersome optical designs that are not well suited to head-mounted displays. A simpler approach may be possible in the form of a dichoptic vision system, wherein each eye receives a different field of view (FOV) of the same scene, at different resolutions. One eye would be presented with high-resolution narrow-FOV foveal imagery, while the other would receive a much wider peripheral FOV. Binocular overlap in the central region would provide some degree of stereoscopic depth perception. It remains to be determined, however, if such a system would be acceptable to users, or if binocular rivalry or other adverse side-effects would degrade visual task performance compared to conventional head-mounted binocular displays. In this paper, we describe a preliminary dichoptic foveal/peripheral vision system and suggest methods by which its usability and performance can be assessed. This effort was funded by the U.S. Air Force Research Laboratory Human Performance Wing under SBIR Topic AF093-018.