Figure 1: Designing for differences in colour vision, such as colour vision deficiency poses challenges for designers.To assist with this a wide body of academic literature has been developed.Given a piece of digital visual media (Left) this assistance either provides designers tools to enable adaptation (Middle-Top) or guidelines to follow (Middle-Bottom).The intended outcome of these aids is digital designs accessible to those with colour vision deficiency (Right).This survey collates and analyses these approaches.

Head-mounted displays were originally introduced to directly present computer-generated information to the human eye. More recently, the potential to use this kind of technology to support human vision and augment human perception has become actively pursued with applications such as compensating for visual impairments or aiding unimpaired vision. Unfortunately, a systematic analysis of the field is missing. Within this work, we close that gap by presenting a design space for vision augmentations that allows research to systematically explore the field of digital eyewear for vision aid and how it can augment the human visual system. We test our design space against currently available solutions and conceptually develop new solutions. The design space and findings can guide future development and can lead to a consistent categorisation of the many existing approaches.

Providing attention guidance, such as assisting in search tasks, is a prominent use for Augmented Reality. Typically, this is achieved by graphically overlaying geometrical shapes such as arrows. However, providing visual guidance can cause side effects such as attention tunnelling or scene occlusions, and introduce additional visual clutter. Alternatively, visual guidance can adjust saliency but this comes with different challenges such as hardware requirements and environment dependent parameters. In this work we advocate for using flicker as an alternative for real-world guidance using Augmented Reality. We provide evidence for the effectiveness of flicker from two user studies. The first compared flicker against alternative approaches in a highly controlled setting, demonstrating efficacy (N = 28). The second investigated flicker in a practical task, demonstrating feasibility with higher ecological validity (N = 20). Finally, our discussion highlights the opportunities and challenges when using flicker to provide real-world visual guidance using Augmented Reality.

Acoustic noise control or cancellation (ANC) is a commonplace component of modern audio headphones. ANC aims to actively mitigate disturbing environmental noise for a quieter and improved listening experience. ANC is digitally controlling frequency and amplitude characteristics of sound. Much less explored is visual noise and active visual noise control, which we address here. We first explore visual noise and scenarios in which visual noise arises based on findings from four workshops we conducted. We then introduce the concept of visual noise cancellation (VNC) and how it can be used to reduce identified effects of visual noise. In addition, we developed head-worn demonstration prototypes to practically explore the concept of active VNC with selected scenarios in a user study. Finally, we discuss the application of VNC, including vision augmentations that moderate the user’s view of the environment to address perceptual needs and to provide augmented reality content.

Optical see-through (OST) head-mounted displays (HMDs) enable users to experience Augmented Reality (AR) support in the form of helpful real-world annotations. Unfortunately, the blend of the environment with virtual augmentations due to semitransparent OST displays often deteriorates the contrast and legibility of annotations. View management algorithms adapt the annotations’ layout to improve legibility based on real-world information, typically captured by built-in HMD cameras. However, the camera views are different from the user’s view through the OST display which decreases the final layout quality. We present eye-perspective view management that synthesizes high-fidelity renderings of the user’s view to optimize annotation placement. Our method significantly improves over traditional camera-based view management in terms of annotation placement and legibility. Eye-perspective optimizations open up opportunities for further research on use cases relying on the user’s true view through OST HMDs.

Augmented Reality has traditionally been used to display digital overlays in real environments. Many AR applications such as remote collaboration, picking tasks, or navigation require highlighting physical objects for selection or guidance. These highlights use graphical cues such as outlines and arrows. Whilst effective, they greatly contribute to visual clutter, possibly occlude scene elements, and can be problematic for long-term use. Substituting those overlays, we explore saliency modulation to accentuate objects in the real environment to guide the user’s gaze. Instead of manipulating video streams, like done in perception and cognition research, we investigate saliency modulation of the real world using optical-see-through head-mounted displays. This is a new challenge, since we do not have full control over the view of the real environment. In this work we provide our specific solution to this challenge, including built prototypes and their evaluation.

Colour vision deficiency is a common visual impairment that cannot be compensated for using optical lenses in traditional glasses, and currently remains untreatable. In our work, we report on research on Computational Glasses for compensating colour vision deficiency. While existing research only showed corrected images within the periphery or as an indirect aid, Computational Glasses build on modified standard optical see-through head-mounted displays and directly modulate the user’s vision, consequently adapting their perception of colours. In this work, we present an exhaustive literature review of colour vision deficiency compensation and subsequent findings; several prototypes with varying advantages—from well-controlled bench prototypes to less controlled but higher application portable prototypes; and a series of studies evaluating our approach starting with proving its efficacy, comparing to the state-of-the-art, and extending beyond static lab prototypes looking at real world applicability. Finally, we evaluated directions for future compensation methods for computational glasses.

Prescription glasses are used by many people as a simple, and even fashionable way, to correct refractive problems of the eye. However, there are other visual impairments that cannot be treated with an optical lens in conventional glasses. In this work we present ChromaGlasses, Computational Glasses using optical head-mounted displays for compensating colour vision deficiency. Unlike prior work that required users to look at a screen in their visual periphery rather than at the environment directly, ChromaGlasses allow users to directly see the environment using a novel head-mounted displays design that analyzes the environment in real-time and changes the appearance of the environment with pixel precision to compensate the impairment of the user. In this work, we present first prototypes for ChromaGlasses and report on the results from several studies showing that ChromaGlasses are an effective method for managing colour blindness.