Experimental investigations of pupil accommodation factors

PURPOSE. The contraction and dilation of the iris muscle that controls the amount of light entering the retina causes pupil accommodation. In this study, experiments were performed and two of the three factors that influence pupil accommodation were analyzed: lighting conditions and depth fixations. The psychological benefits were not examined, because they could not be quantified. METHODS. A head-wearable eyeglasses-based, eye-capturing device was designed to measure pupil size. It included a near-infrared (NIR) camera and an NIR light-emitting diode. Twenty-four subjects watched two-dimensional (2D) and three-dimensional (3D) stereoscopic videos of the same content, and the changes in pupil size were measured by using the eye-capturing device and image-processing methods: RESULTS. The pupil size changed with the intensity of the videos and the disparities between the left and right images of a 3D stereoscopic video. There was correlation between the pupil size and average intensity. The pupil diameter could be estimated as being contracted from approximately 5.96 to 4.25 mm as the intensity varied from 0 to 255. Further, from the changes in the depth fixation for the pupil accommodation, it was confirmed that the depth fixation also affected accommodation of pupil size. CONCLUSIONS. It was confirmed that the lighting condition was an even more significant factor in pupil accommodation than was depth fixation (significance ratio: approximately 3.2:1) when watching 3D stereoscopic video. Pupil accommodation was more affected by depth fixation in the real world than was the binocular convergence in the 3D stereoscopic display.