Julia Niemann

Exploring Design Parameters for a 3D Head-Up Display

Today, head-up displays (HUDs) are commonly used in cars to show basic driving information in the visual field of the viewer. This allows information to be perceived in a quick and easy to understand manner. With advances in technology, HUDs will allow richer information to be conveyed to the driver by exploiting the third dimension. We envision a stereoscopic HUD for displaying content in 3D space. This requires an understanding of how parallaxes impact the users performance and comfort, which is the focus of this work. In two user studies, involving 49 participants, we (a) gather insights into how projection distances and stereoscopic visualizations influence the comfort zone and (b) the depth judgment of the user. The results show that with larger projection distances both the comfort zone and the minimum comfortable viewing distance increase. Higher distances between the viewer and a real world object to be judged decrease the judgment accuracy.