Volumetric displays purport to create real depth perception cues through the use of 3D pixels known as “voxels.” Depth cues can be especially important in automotive settings where drivers need to be alerted to road hazards, pedestrians, or other vehicles. We evaluated a volumetric display in a study designed to evaluate the replication of these depth cues in an automotive setting. 

Participants would need to match virtual rectangles seen in the volumetric display to real world referent objects, as seen in the figure above. This was compared to a regular heads up display whose virtual depth was set to 7m. We found significant difference in participants’ performance at the 12m condition. More results and discussion can be found in our conference paper published at Auto UI ’18. More in depth analysis was performed on the data and how it might affect driver performance in a journal paper published in the International Journal for Mobile Human Computer Interaction.

Lisle, L., Tanous, K., Kim, H., Gabbard, J. L., & Bowman, D. A. (2018, September). Effect of Volumetric Displays on Depth Perception in Augmented Reality. In Proceedings of the 10th International Conference on Automotive User Interfaces and Interactive Vehicular Applications (pp. 155-163). ACM.

Lisle, L., Merenda, C., Tanous, K., Kim, H., Gabbard, J. L., & Bowman, D. A. (2019). Effects of Volumetric Augmented Reality Displays on Human Depth Judgments: Implications for Heads-Up Displays in Transportation. In International Journal of Mobile Human Computer Interaction (IJMHCI), 11(2), 1- 18.