Objective and Subjective Metrics for 3D Display Perception Evaluation

Many modern professional 3D display systems adopt stereo vision and viewer-dependent rendering in order to offer an immersive experience and to enable complex interaction models. Within these scenarios, the ability of the user to effectively perform a task depends both on the correct rendering of the scene and on his ability to perceive it. These factors, in turn, are affected by several error sources, such as accuracy of the user position estimation or lags between tracking and rendering. With this paper, we introduce a practical and sound method to quantitatively assess the accuracy of any view-dependent display approach and the effects of the different error sources. This is obtained by defining a number of metrics that can be used to analyze the results of a set of experiments specially crafted to tickle different aspects of the system. This fills a clear shortcoming of the evaluation methods for 3D displays found in literature, that are, for the most part, qualitative.