Refocusing Supports of Panorama Light-Field Images in Head-Mounted Virtual Reality

Abstract

Virtual Reality (VR) has been deeply researched in recent years, although the novel technology delivers some astonishing experience, it may also cause people the sense of imbalance, dizziness, and vomiting when wearing head-mounted displays (HMDs) after a long period of time. In this paper, we combine the light field technology into a novel panorama viewing system implemented on Unity to provide dynamic depth of field and natural focus effect for better user experience. The system is also coped with FOVE, an HMD with eye-tracking technology, to better track the eye movements and collect the gazing parameters, e.g., gazing point, for better user experience.With such a design, a more immersive panorama image/video viewing experience is delivered. An evaluation is held for the user experience, which shows that our proposed system reduces the refocusing time by up to 319 times and increases the subjective Mean Opinion Score (MOS) by 19%.