See What I Mean? Mobile Eye-Perspective Rendering for Optical See-through Head-mounted Displays

Abstract: Image-based scene understanding allows Augmented Reality systems to provide contextual visual guidance in unprepared, real-world environments. While effective on video see-through (VST) head-mounted displays (HMDs), such methods suffer on optical see-through (OST) HMDs due to misregistration between the world-facing camera and the user's eye perspective. To approximate the user's true eye view, we implement and evaluate three software-based eye-perspective rendering (EPR) techniques on a commercially available, untethered OST HMD (Microsoft HoloLens 2): (1) Plane-Proxy EPR, projecting onto a fixed-distance plane; (2) Mesh-Proxy EPR, using SLAM-based reconstruction for projection; and (3) Gaze-Proxy EPR, a novel eye-tracking-based method that aligns the projection with the user's gaze depth. A user study on real-world tasks underscores the importance of accurate EPR and demonstrates gaze-proxy as a lightweight alternative to geometry-based methods. We release our EPR framework as open source.