Through a different lens: the perceived quality of light field visualization assessed by test participants with imperfect visual acuity and color blindness

Light field visualization technology has progressed significantly in the past two decades. With the emergence of commercially-available devices, both industry and academia have begun research on the potential use cases of future society, including medical visualization, 3D digital signage, telepresence, military applications and many more. During the evaluation and quality assessment of such usage contexts and display types, test participants are typically screened for visual acuity via the Snellen chart and color vision via the Ishihara plates. However, there is an unfortunate global trend that the eyesight of the new generations is getting notably worse, and other sight-related issues, such as color vision deficiency, are becoming more common as well. Therefore, while medical technologies do relentlessly combat the diseases and disorders of the human eye, long-term innovations of visualization must also account for such users. Yet at the time of this paper, those with imperfect vision are underrepresented in light field research. In this paper, we present the results of the series of subjective tests carried out on light field displays, exclusively with test participants that otherwise would not qualify to assess visualization quality in a regular study. The experiments aim at investigating the most relevant research questions of light field visualization quality, such as spatial resolution, angular resolution and viewing distance. Test participants with imperfect visual acuity are classified by the diopters of their corrective lenses, and correlations between diopters and subjective ratings are addressed. Similar analyses were performed for color-blind test participants as well.