Ambiculus: LED-based low-resolution peripheral display extension for immersive head-mounted displays

Peripheral vision in immersive virtual environments is important for application fields that require high spatial awareness and veridical impressions of three-dimensional spaces. Head-mounted displays (HMDs), however, use displays and optical elements in front of a user's eyes, which often do not natively support a wide field of view to stimulate the entire human visual field. Such limited visual angles are often identified as causes of reduced navigation performance and sense of presence. In this paper we present an approach to extend the visual field of HMDs towards the periphery by incorporating additional optical LED elements structured in an array, which provide additional low-resolution information in the periphery of a user's eyes. We detail our approach, technical realization, and present an experiment, in which we show that such far peripheral stimulation can increase subjective estimates of presence, and has the potential to change user behavior during navigation in a virtual environment.