Effective Free Field of View Scene Exploration in VR and AR

We propose to improve virtual reality (VR) and optical see-through augmented reality (AR) head-mounted display scene exploration efficiency by allowing the user to adapt the field of view interactively. This way the user can zoom in to examine parts of the scene in more detail without having to translate the viewpoint forward, as would be required in conventional fixed field of view scene exploration. The user can also zoom out, to gain a more comprehensive view of the scene and to examine distant parts of the scene in parallel, without the need to translate the viewpoint backward. Zooming in is supported with a focus+context visualization approach that integrates a distortion-free magnified focus region seamlessly into context. For AR, the higher resolution focus region is resampled from the video feed acquired by a head-mounted high-resolution camera. We demonstrate the benefits of our free field of view scene exploration in the context of VR and AR tasks, where it brings a substantial reduction of viewpoint translation, view direction rotation, and task completion time.