Measuring the Effect of Stereo Deficiencies on Peripersonal Space Pointing

State-of-the-art Virtual Reality (VR) and Augmented Reality (AR) headsets rely on singlefocal stereo displays. For objects away from the focal plane, such displays create a vergence-accommodation conflict (VAC), potentially degrading user interaction performance. In this paper, we study how the VAC affects pointing at targets within arm's reach with virtual hand and raycasting interaction in current stereo display systems. We use a previously proposed experimental methodology that extends the ISO 9241–411:2015 multi-directional selection task to enable fair comparisons between selecting targets in different display conditions. We conducted a user study with eighteen participants and the results indicate that participants were faster and had higher throughput in the constant VAC condition with the virtual hand. We hope that our results enable designers to choose more efficient interaction methods in virtual environments.