Enhancing user experience of 3D displayed virtual scenes with content analysis and minimizing effects of virtual reality sickness

Providing a depth-rich Virtual Reality (VR) experience to users without causing discomfort remains to be a challenge with today's commercially available head-mounted displays (HMDs), which enforce strict measures on stereoscopic camera parameters for the sake of keeping visual discomfort to a minimum. However, these measures often lead to an unimpressive VR experience with shallow depth feeling. We propose the first method ready to be used with existing consumer HMDs for automated stereoscopic camera control in virtual environments (VEs). Using radial basis function interpolation and projection matrix manipulations, our method makes it possible to significantly enhance user experience in terms of overall perceived depth while maintaining visual discomfort on a par with the default arrangement. In our implementation, we also introduce the first immersive interface for authoring a unique 3D stereoscopic cinematography for any VE to be experienced with consumer HMDs. We conducted a user study that demonstrates the benefits of our approach in terms of superior picture quality and perceived depth. We also investigated the effects of using depth of field (DoF) in combination with our approach and observed that the addition of our DoF implementation was seen as a degraded experience, if not similar.