Software Based Visual Aberration Correction for HMDs

Abstract

When using current head-mounted displays (HMDs), users with optical aberrations need to wear the equipment on the top of their own glasses. As both the HMDs and the glasses require to be tightly attached to faces, wearing them together is very inconvenient and uncomfortable, and thus degrades user experiences heavily. In this paper, we propose a real-time image pre-correction technique to correct the aberrations purely by software. Users can take off their own glasses and enjoy the virtual reality (VR) experience through an ordinary HMD freely and comfortably. Furthermore, as our technique is not related to hardware, it is compatible with all the current commercial HMDs. Our technique is based on the observation that the refractive errors majorly cause the ideal retinal image to be convolved by certain kernels. So we pre-correct the image on the display according to the specific aberrations of a user, aiming to maximize the similarity between the convolved retinal image and the ideal image. To achieve real-time performance, we modify the energy function to have linear solutions and implement the optimization fully on GPU. The experiments and the user study indicate that without any changes on hardware, we generate better viewing experience of HMDs for users with optical aberrations.