Demo Hour

Expanding the field-of-view of head-mounted displays with peripheral vision

Field-of-view (FoV) is one of the key parameters of head-mounted displays (HMDs), because a wider FoV gives higher presence and immersion in a virtual environment. We propose a method that expands the FoV of HMDs by using two kinds of lenses with different levels of magnification. A central convex lens is surrounded by a Fresnel lens with high magnification that fills the peripheral vision with a blurred image. This method doesn't need complicated optics, and is advantageous in terms of device cost and weight because only two additional Fresnel lenses are necessary.

Yamada, W. and Manabe, H. Expanding the field-of-view of head-mounted displays with peripheral blurred images. Adjunct Proc. of the 29th Annual ACM Symposium on User Interface Software & Technology. ACM, New York, 2016.

Wataru Yamada, NTT DOCOMO,
[email protected]

Manabe Hiroyuki, NTT DOCOMO,
[email protected]

Top: entire prototype. Bottom: (a) the prototype with convex lenses and Fresnel lenses (b) the prototype with only convex lenses.