An evaluation of depth perception on volumetric displays

We present an experiment that compares volumetric displays to existing 3D display techniques in three tasks that require users to perceive depth in 3D scenes. Because they generate imagery in true 3D space, volumetric displays allow viewers to use their natural physiological mechanisms for depth perception, without requiring special hardware such as head trackers or shutter glasses. However, it is unclear from the literature as to whether these displays are actually better than the status-quo for enabling the perception of 3D scenes, thus motivating the present study. Our results show that volumetric displays enable significantly better user performance in a simple depth judgment task, and better performance in a collision judgment task, but in its current form does not enhance user comprehension of more complex 3D scenes.