Simple and Practical Dual Rendering for Reducing Eye Fatigue from Vergence-Accommodation Conflict in Stereoscopic Viewing

Eye fatigue and unpleasant symptoms caused by the vergence and accommodation conflict with stereoscopic rendering pose a substantial usability issue in virtual reality. To address this problem, dual rendering of the stereoscopic imagery is proposed, aimed to alleviate such stress on the user. First, the scene is divided into two regions: the front proximal zone and the rest behind it. The back layer is rendered first for objects in the rest, with the conventional stereoscopic viewing parameter values. Then, remaining objects in the proximal zone are rendered using viewing parameters adjusted to reduce the VAC. The validation experiment confirmed that the proposed approach significantly reduced the overall eye fatigue without compromising the user's depth perception ability to manipulate objects in the parameters-altered proximal zone.