A study of depth perception in hand-held augmented reality using autostereoscopic displays

Displaying three-dimensional content on a flat display is bound to reduce the impression of depth, particularly for mobile video see-trough augmented reality. Several applications in this domain can benefit from accurate depth perception, especially if there are contradictory depth cues, like occlusion in a x-ray visualization. The use of stereoscopy for this effect is already prevalent in head-mounted displays, but there is little research on the applicability for hand-held augmented reality. We have implemented such a prototype using an off-the-shelf smartphone equipped with a stereo camera and an autostereoscopic display. We designed and conducted an extensive user study to explore the effects of stereoscopic hand-held augmented reality on depth perception. The results show that in this scenario depth judgment is mostly influenced by monoscopic depth cues, but our system can improve positioning accuracy in challenging scenes.