Colour Calibration of a Head Mounted Display for Colour Vision Research using Virtual Reality

Abstract

Virtual reality (VR) technology offers visionresearchers the opportunity to conduct immersive stud-ies in simulated real-world scenes. However, an accur-ate colour calibration of the VR head mounted display(HMD), both in terms of luminance and chromaticity,is required to precisely control the presented stimuli.Such a calibration presents significant new challenges,for example, due to the large field of view of the HMD,or the software implementation used for scene rendering, which might alter the colour appearance of objects.Here, we propose a framework for calibrating an HMDusing an imaging colorimeter, the I29 (Radiant VisionSystems, Redmond, WA, USA). We examine two scen-arios, both with and without using a rendering soft-ware for visualisation. In addition, we present a colourconstancy experiment design for VR through a gam-ing engine software, Unreal Engine 4. The colours ofthe objects of study are chosen according to the pre-viously defined calibration. Results show a high colourconstancy performance among participants, in agree-ment with recent studies performed on real-world scen-arios. Our studies show that our methodology allowsus to control and measure the colours presented in theHMD, effectively enabling the use of VR technology forcolour vision research.