UC Berkeley

Due to the lateral separation of our eyes, the human visual system takes in two slightly different views of the world. These two views must be combined by the visual system into a single percept. Importantly, binocular combination can be challenged when the left and right eye views differ from each other, for example, in luminance, contrast or color. Failures of binocular combination can result in double vision, losses in-depth perception, and troublesome visual appearances like binocular rivalry. With advances in wearable binocular display technologies for virtual and augmented reality, the subjective appearances associated with artificial binocular differences introduced by these displays warrant in depth evaluation. This dissertation contains a body of work characterizing the subjective appearance of images in which different contrasts are presented to the two eyes. The work herein builds on seminal studies in vision science that paved the way for our understanding of binocular appearance, but primarily studied simplistic visual stimuli such as grating patterns that differ substantially from the structured and complex visual inputs that our visual system evolved for. In Chapter 1, I extend on prior work and examine percepts associated with a range of stimulus patterns with various degrees of complexity to deepen our understanding of binocular combination. In the remaining chapters, I leverage these insights to examine the implications of binocular appearance for three key applications in computer graphics and binocular display design: display imperfections, tonemapping, and field of view coverage. Wearable display technologies will advance the way that we interact with digital content and with the world at large, but their utility and impact are contingent on whether or not they can integrate well with our natural vision. Thus, in each chapter I discuss design guidelines based on the perceptual results to aid the development of better binocular displays that prevents undesirable visual artifacts, and exploit binocular vision to loosen technical specifications.