Visual discomfort is an important factor that influences viewing experience in immersive multimedia, for example, 3DTV and VR. With the added value of depth, the novel perceptual experience, visual discomfort is not an easy task for observers to evaluate. In this study, we investigate how the subjective methodology affects the test results in 3DTV condition. Two subjective visual discomfort experiments were conducted. One used the Pair Comparison (PC) method and the other used the Absolute-Category Rating (ACR) method. The results demonstrated that PC method had more powerful discriminability. For a difficult perceptualrelated tasks, such as visual discomfort in our study, PC was more easy to understand and conduct for the observers which led to reliable results. It also showed some very important but usually ignored conclusions on the subjective experiment, i.e., for measuring the perceived visual discomfort, the observer's judgment behavior might be affected by the test methodology.
With the rapid development of mobile Head-Mounted Display (HMD), the problem of visual discomfort and visual fatigue caused by watching Virtual Reality (VR) contents became a crucial concern for consumers and manufacturers, especially given that the casing of mobile HMD keeps the phone at a specified distance from the lenses that is close to the eyes. In this regard, we conducted both subjective and objective measure to evaluate visual discomfort and visual fatigue caused by watching HMD and smartphones. Participants answered Simulator Sickness Questionnaire (SSQ) and went through optometric tests that measure tear break-up time, spherical equivalent, and contrast sensitivity. Experimental results show that HMD causes more eye dryness compared to smartphones.