Improving Depth Perception for Hand-held Augmented Reality using Autostereoscopic Displays

Displaying three-dimensional content on a flat display is bound to reduce the impression of depth, particularly for mobile video see-trough augmented reality. Several applications in this domain can benefit from accurate depth perception, especially if there are contradictory depth cues, like occlusion in a x-ray visualization. The use of stereoscopy for this effect is already prevalent in headmounted displays, but the there is little research on the applicability for hand-held augmented reality. We have implemented such a prototype using an off-the-shelf smartphone equipped with a stereo camera and an autostereoscopic display. The systems achieves interactive frame rates by restricting the tracking to the left image and transformation of the results to the other side. We designed and conducted an extensive user study to explore the effects of stereoscopic hand-held augmented reality on depth perception. The results show that our system can significantly improve depth positioning accuracy, especially in scenes that lack other cues.