RENEW: I’ve created a video example showing a real-time implementation.

Last year we published a paper at the Virtual Reality Software and Technology (VRST ’13) conference on the topic of color correction for see-through displays. This paper proposes a solution to color mixing, which is a phenomenon where colors on transparent displays appear “washed out”; that is, the perceived color is a combination of the display and background colors. Our solution is called “color correction”, and this paper presents it in a very technical way because it is necessary to illustrate a new understanding of the mixing problem and put forward some numbers about how accurate color correction can be. Please check our paper here:

Srikanth Kirshnamachari Sridharan, Juan David Hincapié-Ramos, David R. Flatla, and Pourang Irani. 2013. Color correction for see-through optical displays using display color profiles. In theProceedings of the 19th ACM Symposium on Virtual Reality Software and Technology (VRST ’13). ACM, New York, NY, USA, 231-240.

Color correction is very important for HMDs, because color mixing affects the usability of the device especially outdoors. Field studies of HMDs over time reveal that users have difficulty accessing display content due to having to look for dark spots or cover the lens with their hands (not so good for AR ;)). With the arrival of a wave of HMDs for the consumer market such as the Meta, Atheer One, Moverio BT-200 and Ora-S, color correction will certainly get a lot of attention. Our results for a projection display (EPSON 3700 on Lumisty film) show that color correction produces 36% more accurate colors. Similar results can be achieved for HMD. This is a significant result because platform or application developers can achieve better color without any hardware modifications.

One thing I really wanted to include in this paper, but ran out of space, was an example of how good graphics can be after color correcting and that’s what I plan to do in this post. The two images below will be corrected in different backgrounds (the accuracy of these samples is confirmed in section 5 of the paper):

The following figure shows the correction accuracy achieved with the binned profile approach. This is how the IronMan model looks on the HMD with different backgrounds without color correction (left) and with color correction (right).

And this is how our rhino model looks on the HMD with different backgrounds without color correction (left) and with color correction (right).

This image shows how color correction greatly improves the quality of the graphics that users see. We are very encouraged by our results and continuing work in this area, I will publish new results as soon as we publish/patent them.

Resource

• Sridharan, SK, Hincapié-Ramos, JD, Flatla, DR and Irani, P. 2013. Color correction for optical see-through displays using display color profiles. In Proc VRST ’13. ACM. [pdf (7.2MB)]
• Hincapié-Ramos, JD, Ivanchuk, L., Sridharan, SK and Irani, P. 2014. SmartColor: Real-Time Color and Contrast Correction for Head-Mounted See-through Optical Displays. In Proc. ISMAR ’14. ACM. [pdf (1.7MB)]
• Hincapié-Ramos, JD, Ivanchuk, L., Sridharan, SK and Irani, P. 2015. SmartColor – Real-Time Color and Contrast Correction for Head-Mounted See-through Optical Displays. Visualization and Computer Graphics, IEEE Transactions on. To Appear.