
Imagery from optical see-through (OST) head-mounted displays (HMDs) is perceived as a blending of light emitted by the display added to the light from the user’s physical environment, which can result in color distortions and desaturation of the virtual imagery. Due to these limitations, the user’s ability to distinguish between colors shown on the display may be reduced compared to more traditional types of displays, which may impact the interpretation of the symbology, and potentially reduce performance. Further, individual variation in color perception may also impact the utility of color symbology in OST HMDs. In this paper, we present a user study that investigates the utility of color-coded symbology displayed on an OST Augmented Reality (AR) display within a flight simulator. We compare performance between participants with normal color vision and participants with color vision deficiencies in a dynamic flight simulator and investigate effects of symbology contrast and symbology color set on participant response times, accuracy, and eye behavior. Our results suggest that for the color sets tested, increasing the size of the set beyond a monochrome color results in reduced performance for both color normal and color deficient subjects. It’s possible that custom color sets specific to OST displays are needed to achieve performance benefits.

Color vision deficiency is a common affliction for males, impacting about 8% of the population. The effects of this – colloquial – color blindness is the inability or limited ability to distinguish colors. A typical problem might be that a color changing LED, changing between red and green to indicate two states, will not be differentiated. There are multiple ways to detect and distinguish color deficient people, ranging from genetic testing, to simple pseudo-isochromatic charts, as exemplified by the likely most known Ishihara charts, to elaborate color matching and color sorting tests, as exemplified by the Farnsworth-Munsell 100 Hue test. In this talk describe initial experimental data on changing the background color – or the color “in between the dots” - for a pseudo-isochromatic chart color deficiency test. For the experiment, we replaced the white background with 4 different neutral gray-level values and measured the performance of known color deficient observers on these charts as a function of the new background. Though preliminary, the data show a significant difference in the performance of color deficient observers, despite the main pseudo-isochromatic colors staying the same.

It is necessary to avoid using of confusion colors of dichromats in order to mediate information defined by color in visual materials to anyone. Such a color design method is called color universal design. Dichromatic simulators have been widely used for the color universal design. Recently, a new color universal design method without a dichromatic simulator has been proposed. Yoshitake et al. made a color sample set for the new color universal design method by the Natural Color System chips containing 1948 colors. We designed a campus map using their sample set in a campus barrierfree design project at Kyushu University. We show the results of the Kyushu University barrier-free design project.