Visually guided movement in virtual reality is tolerant of the vergence-accommodation conflict

Stereoscopic virtual reality (VR) headsets display vergence cues to object distance but present images at a fixed focus, resulting in a vergence -accommodation conflict (VAC). This study examined the effects of introducing or reducing the VAC with optical lenses in a targeted reaching task implemented in both VR and the real world. Contrary to previous reports of reduced visual performance and fatigue with the VAC, we found no evidence of impairments to visually guided movement for either the real -world or VR-based versions of the task. As lenses also magnify or minify the image, a control experiment was conducted to examine the effects of image minification on movement in VR. No significant effects of optical correction or image minification were found, suggesting that the VAC does not adversely affect visually guided movement over the durations employed in this study.