Interaction-free calibration for optical see-through head-mounted displays based on 3D Eye localization

It is a common problem of AR applications that optical see-through head-mounted displays (OST-HMD) move on users´ heads or are even temporarily taken off, thus requiring frequent (re)calibrations. If such calibrations involve user interactions, they are time consuming and distract users from their applications. Furthermore, they inject user-dependent errors into the system setup and reduce users´ acceptance of OST-HMDs. To overcome these problems, we present a method that utilizes dynamic 3D eye position measurements from an eye tracker in combination with pre-computed, static display calibration parameters. Our experiments provide a comparison of our calibration with SPAAM (Single Point Active Alignment Method) for several head-display conditions: in the first condition, repeated calibrations are conducted while keeping the display position on the user´s head fixed. In the second condition, users take the HMD off and put it back on in between calibrations. The result shows that our new calibration with eye tracking is more stable than repeated SPAAM calibrations. We close with a discussion on potential error sources which should be removed to achieve higher calibration quality.