Motion-to-photon latency causes images to sway from side to side in a VR/AR system, while display persistence causes smearing; both of these are undesirable artifacts. We show that once latency is reduced or eliminated, smearing due to display persistence becomes the dominant visual artifact, even with accurate tracker prediction. We investigate the human perceptual mechanisms responsible for this and we demonstrate a modified 3D rotation display controller architecture for driving a high speed digital display which minimizes latency and persistence. We simulate it in software and we built a testbench based on a very high frame rate (2880 fps 1-bit images) display system mounted on a mechanical rotation gantry which emulates display rotation during head rotation in an HMD.

This paper describes the design and implementation of an architecture for interactively viewing static light fields with very low latency. The system was deliberately over engineered to specifications much tighter than expected necessary to eliminate perceptible latency. This allowed us to relax the specifications to the point at which human users began to detect latency artifacts. We found empirically that when interacting with a light field, human users began to notice latency artifacts when the total system latency is approximately 15 ms. Although the architecture may not be used in practice, this result should prove fundamental for designers of future interactive graphics systems. CR Categories and Subject Descriptors: I.3.3 [Computer Graphics]: Picture/Image Generation - Viewing Algorithms. 1