Eye-Perspective View Management for Optical See-Through Head-Mounted Displays

Optical see-through (OST) head-mounted displays (HMDs) enable users to experience Augmented Reality (AR) support in the form of helpful real-world annotations. Unfortunately, the blend of the environment with virtual augmentations due to semitransparent OST displays often deteriorates the contrast and legibility of annotations. View management algorithms adapt the annotations’ layout to improve legibility based on real-world information, typically captured by built-in HMD cameras. However, the camera views are different from the user’s view through the OST display which decreases the final layout quality. We present eye-perspective view management that synthesizes high-fidelity renderings of the user’s view to optimize annotation placement. Our method significantly improves over traditional camera-based view management in terms of annotation placement and legibility. Eye-perspective optimizations open up opportunities for further research on use cases relying on the user’s true view through OST HMDs.