SPOTLIGHT ON… Research Group GRAPHDECO & the INRIA’s paper at the SIGGRAPH 2017

GRAPHDECO (team.inria.fr/graphdeco) is a research group at Inria Sophia-Antipolis (www.inria.fr), focusing on research in the domain of computer graphics.

We develop novel solutions for image-based rendering techniques, in particular developing solutions that will allow highly realistic virtual experiences of existing sites, such as Çatalhöyük.

Another research focus of the group is on head-mounted display (HMD) technologies, and in particular perceptual studies to determine which display solutions reduce fatigue for virtual reality.

In particular, we focus on one known source of discomfort: the vergence-accommodation (VA) conflict. The VA conflict is the difference between accommodation (focus at the screen) and vergence (eyes turning towards a target at a given depth).

We have recently published a research paper on this topic and a video which was presented at the prestigious ACM SIGGRAPH conference this summer, and will appear in the top journal of our field ACM Transactions on Graphics.

We developed a new device that allows us to measure accommodation (the actual focus of the human eye) when viewing an HMD screen, and performed experiments on different viewing conditions, including a design with focus-adjustable lenses.

Our results show that only the focus-adjustable-lens design drives accommodation effectively, while other solutions used by previous systems (e.g., depth-of-field blur) do not drive accommodation to the simulated distance and thus do not resolve the VA conflict.  Our results also show that focus-adjustable lenses reduce discomfort significantly more than other solutions.

This research result is important in guiding choices of display technologies in virtual and augmented reality settings, such as those in EMOTIVE.

Accommodation and Comfort in Head-Mounted Displays (SIGGRAPH 2017)