Gaze contingent hologram synthesis for holographic head-mounted-display

Development of display and its related technologies provides immersive visual experience with head-mounted-display (HMD). However, most available HMDs provide 3D perception only by stereopsis, lack of accommodation depth cues. Recently, holographic HMD (HHMD) arises as one viable option to resolve this problem because hologram is known to provide full set of depth cues including accommodation. Moreover, by virtue of increasing computational power, hologram synthesis from 3D object represented by point cloud can be calculated in real time even with rigorous Rayleigh-Sommerfeld diffraction formula. However, in HMD, rapid gaze change of the user requires much faster refresh rate, which means that much faster hologram synthesis is indispensable in HHMD. Because the visual acuity falls off in the visual periphery, we propose here to accelerate synthesizing hologram by differentiating density of point cloud projected on the screen. We classify the screen into multiple layers which are concentric circles with different radii, where the center is aligned with gaze of user. Layer with smaller radius is closer to the region of interest, hence, assigned with higher density of point cloud. Because the computation time is directly related to the number of points in point cloud, we can accelerate synthesizing hologram by lowering density of point cloud in the visual periphery. Cognitive study reveals that user cannot discriminate those degradation in the visual periphery if the parameters are properly designed. Prototype HHMD system will be provided for verifying the feasibility of our method, and detailed design scheme will be discussed.