What is HDR? Perceptual Impact of Luminance and Contrast in Immersive Displays

The contrast and luminance capabilities of a display are central to the quality of the image. High dynamic range (HDR) displays have high luminance and contrast, but it can be difficult to ascertain whether a given set of characteristics qualifies for this label. This is especially unclear for new display modes, such as virtual reality (VR). This paper studies the perceptual impact of peak luminance and contrast of a display, including characteristics and use cases representative of VR. To achieve this goal, we first developed a haploscope testbed prototype display capable of achieving 1,000 nits peak luminance and 1,000,000:1 contrast with high precision. We then collected a novel HDR video dataset targetting VR-relevant content types. We also implemented custom tone mapping operators to map between display parameter sets. Finally, we collected subjective preference data spanning 3 orders of magnitude in each dimension. Our data was used to fit a model, which was validated using a subjective study on an HDR VR prototype headmounted display (HMD). Our model helps provide guidance for future display design, and helps standardize the understanding of HDR1.