Evaluation of Depth Perception of Monocular Video See-through Head Mounted Display

In order to support the manufacturing operations interactively, we develop monocular video see-through head mounted display (HMD) as a human interface. The operating instructions are programmed according to the state of the object and the work situation, and presented to a worker through HMD. The presentation image is a synthetic image of the operating instructions drawn by the computer graphics (CG) on the real image captured by the camera. The worker can perform the task while watching those operating instructions. At that time, because of the worker equips the monocular video see-through HMD, she/he watches the object directly by one eye, and watches the image of object through HMD by another eye. In order to work efficiently in such a situation, it is preferable that the worker has similar depth perception compared with the state that HMD is not equipped. Therefore, it is necessary to evaluate the depth perception of the worker equipped with the monocular video see-through HMD. In this paper, monocular video see-through HMD for manufacturing support is examined, and, as a result, two prototype devices are proposed. The experimental evaluation results of the depth perception using those devices are reported.