The influence of screen size and scene on viewing experience for autostereoscopic 3D display

Abstract The visual experience of viewing three‐dimensional (3D) content is dependent on parallax and screen size. A 5x4x2 completely within‐subject design was conducted in this study through a subjective assessment experiment. A total of 50 subjects viewed four scenes of 3D video sequences varying at five parallax levels on the autostereoscopic 3D displays of two screen sizes. Each of the overall viewing experiences of perceived depth, perceived image quality, naturalness, and viewing comfort was assessed. As indicated by the results of the experiment, parallax and screen size levels affected all viewing experience factors, whereas scenes only exerted a certain effect on perceived depth, naturalness, and visual comfort. The sensitivity of perceived image quality to parallax variation was lower than other parameters. To be specific, an excessive increase in the depth led to the reduced perceived image quality and visual comfort due to the occurrence of 3D artifacts, which becomes a problem to be solved. Although the large screen outperformed the small screen in perceived depth and naturalness, the small screen led to an improvement in perceived image quality and visual comfort. Moreover, the result confirmed that scene nature can serve as a critical factor for the 3D visual experience.