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Head-mounted display

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(Redirected from Headset)
See also: Terms and Technical Terms
Oculus Rift DK1 released in 2013

A head-mounted display (HMD) is a display device worn on the head, either on a headband or strap or as part of a helmet, that places one or two small image sources and their optics in front of the wearer's eyes. Per eye, an HMD consists of a modulated light source with drive electronics, viewed through an optical system and held in a housing on the head.[1] Because the display is fixed to the head, adding head tracking lets the rendered image change as the wearer moves. Ivan Sutherland, who built one of the first computer-driven HMDs, described the idea in 1968 as presenting "the user with a perspective image which changes as he moves".[2] This pairing of a near-eye display with head tracking is the basic display hardware of virtual reality and of many augmented reality systems.

Head-mounted displays range from opaque VR headsets that replace the view of the real world, through headsets that show the surroundings with cameras, to see-through AR headsets and lightweight smart glasses that overlay a small amount of information on the wearer's view. The term also covers specialized hardware such as the helmet-mounted displays of military aviation, which share the abbreviation HMD.[1] In its market outlook updated on 1 July 2026, the research firm IDC said it expected smart glasses "to continue displacing traditional VR/MR headsets as the primary growth engine for XR" through 2030.[3]

Binocular HMDs, the usual form for VR, present two slightly different images, one for each eye, so that the visual system can use binocular disparity to perceive depth.[1] A virtual reality headset is one type of HMD; this article covers the general device class, its history, optics and human factors.

Reviewed 13 October 2026. Checked all cited claims, quotes, dates, specs and table values against the opened sources and Crossref metadata, plus the restored image, links and categories. About review dates.

Definition and terminology

Optical engineers Jannick Rolland and Hong Hua note that these devices are today often called head-worn displays, while historically they have been referred to as head-mounted displays.[1] A widely cited 2006 review by Ozan Cakmakci and Rolland uses the head-worn term in its title.[4] In military use the abbreviation HMD also stands for the helmet-mounted display, in which the display is attached to a flight or combat helmet.[1]

HMDs are classified in several ways. From the user's point of view they are monocular (one eye sees a display), biocular (both eyes see the same image) or binocular (each eye sees its own image, allowing stereoscopic depth). By their optics they are either immersive, blocking the direct view of the real world, or see-through, adding synthetic images to it.[1] Rolland and Hua also place HMDs on the reality-virtuality continuum, with fully immersive displays at one end, displays that only capture real environments at the other, and see-through displays that blend real and graphical objects in between.[1]

History

Precursors

On 24 May 1957 the filmmaker Morton Heilig filed a patent for a "Stereoscopic-Television Apparatus for Individual Use", granted as US 2,955,156 on 4 October 1960. The design placed a small television tube and lens system in front of each eye inside a casing shaped to the face, aiming at a field of view of about 140 degrees, and added adjustable earphones and two nozzles that could blow air at controlled speeds, temperatures and scents. Straps held it on the head and a hooded rear end blocked outside light.[5] Its images were to come from separate film or television cameras, and the patent describes no head tracking.[5]

In the early 1960s two researchers at the electronics company Philco built a helmet display, known as Headsight, around a small television tube; movements of the wearer's head steered a remote camera whose picture was shown on the tube. MIXED describes it as a functional prototype; its image came from a camera rather than from a computer.[6]

Sutherland's 1968 display

The first graphics-driven HMD is credited to computer scientist Ivan Sutherland.[1] The work was performed at Harvard University with funding from the Advanced Research Projects Agency, the Office of Naval Research and Bell Telephone Laboratories, and Sutherland presented it at the Fall Joint Computer Conference in December 1968, by which time he had moved to the University of Utah.[2] The Computer History Museum describes the system as "probably the first head-mounted stereoscopic display".[7] The system is described in more detail at Ivan Sutherland's head-mounted 3D display.

Sutherland's headset magnified the pictures on two miniature cathode ray tubes, each forming an image about half an inch square, to produce a virtual image about eighteen inches in front of each eye, with a 40 degree field of view. Half-silvered mirrors in the prisms let the user see both the computer images and the room, so displayed objects could "hang disembodied in space" or coincide with real objects such as maps, desk tops or walls.[2] It was therefore an optical see-through display, the type later used for augmented reality.[8] The equipment could draw 3000 lines at 30 frames per second.[2]

Sutherland wrote that stereo presentation, though important, mattered less to the three-dimensional illusion than the change in the image when the user moved the head. Two head position sensors were built: a mechanical arm hanging from the ceiling, with universal joints and a sliding center section, which he called "rather heavy and uncomfortable to use"; and a continuous-wave ultrasonic sensor designed at MIT Lincoln Laboratory by Charles Seitz and Stylianos Pezaris. The paper credits Harvard student Robert Sproull and graduate students Ted Lee and Dan Cohen as essential contributors.[2] The ceiling-mounted arm gave the system its nickname, the "Sword of Damocles"; the museum states that the display was suspended from the ceiling to reduce the weight on the wearer.[7][9]

Military helmet-mounted displays

Military aviation developed helmet displays in parallel. According to Rolland and Hua, the U.S. Army flew a helmet-mounted sighting system on the Cobra helicopter and the U.S. Navy fired missiles using HMDs in the 1960s; the Army later deployed the Integrated Helmet and Display Sighting System (IHADSS) on the AH-64 Apache helicopter. Although monocular, the IHADSS "greatly contributed to the proliferation of all types of HMDs".[1] The IHADSS monocular has a 40 by 30 degree field of view with symbology and video overlays, and the electro-optical sensors on the Apache's nose are slaved to the pilot's head position so that the night sensors point where the pilot looks.[10] Rolland, Holloway and Fuchs list the VCASS system, described by Thomas Furness in 1986, among the optical see-through HMDs built for military applications.[8] A 2013 review of avionic HMDs in Optical Engineering identifies weight, field of view, modulation transfer function, exit pupil size and eye relief as the main optical parameters of such systems.[11]

The F-35 Lightning II uses a helmet-mounted display system supplied by a joint venture of Collins Aerospace and Elbit Systems of America. Its Distributed Aperture System streams imagery from six infrared cameras around the aircraft to the helmet, letting pilots "look through" the airframe, and flight data and warnings appear on the visor. Military & Aerospace Electronics describes the F-35 as "the first tactical fighter aircraft in 50 years without a traditional HUD".[12] In February 2024 the joint venture, Collins Elbit Vision Systems, announced delivery of its 3,000th F-35 Gen III helmet-mounted display system.[13]

Research systems and the first commercial headsets

At NASA's Ames Research Center in the mid-1980s, the Virtual Visual Environment Display (VIVED) was built as "a head-mounted, wide-angle, stereoscopic display system controlled by its operator's position, voice, and gestures", and it is considered "the first low-cost, head-mounted display virtual environment system". The Virtual Interactive Environment Workstation (VIEW), as the NASA Ames archive names it, was derived from it and combined a head-mounted display with data gloves, speech input and output, auditory display, graphics and trackers.[14] Scott Fisher and colleagues described the NASA system in a 1986 paper, "Virtual environment display system".[15]

Many of these systems used wide-angle LEEP optics, which Rolland and Hua describe as the first large field-of-view, non-pupil-forming optics used extensively in the pioneering period of virtual environments.[1] According to LEEP Systems, NASA and VPL Research had used LEEP viewing lenses in head-mounted display projects since 1985, and the original LEEP Cyberface, released by Eric Howlett in March 1989, was the first commercial head-mounted display. It was monochromatic, offered very wide-angle stereo, and originally came packaged with a complete telepresence system.[16] The later Cyberface4 was a higher resolution iteration of the Cyberface3, built into LEEP's Virtual Orbiter trade show attraction, first shown publicly in November 1995.[17]

VPL Research, founded by Jaron Lanier, sold a system that included the EyePhone. Revisiting a 1989 report in 2016, NPR described the EyePhone as "oversized goggles with two miniature video monitors inside that produce 3-D images" and said that in 1989 the whole rig, headset and computer, cost $250,000.[18] Image sources changed over the same period: early HMDs mostly used miniature monochrome CRTs, then VGA (640 by 480) active-matrix LCDs, followed by higher resolution LCDs, ferroelectric liquid crystal on silicon and OLED microdisplays.[1] At the University of North Carolina, researchers built both optical and video see-through HMDs from the 1980s, with real-time 3D visualization of a fetus during ultrasound examination as the driving application for video see-through.[8]

Personal viewers continued to appear after the 1990s. Sony's HMZ-T1 Personal 3D Viewer, announced in September 2011, used two 0.7-inch OLED panels with 1280 by 720 resolution and simulated a screen of about 150 inches viewed from 12 feet; Sony planned to sell it in the United States from November 2011 at about $799.[19]

The consumer VR revival

The modern wave of consumer head-mounted displays began with the Oculus Rift. Its 2012 Kickstarter campaign set a $250,000 goal, passed it in less than 24 hours and raised more than $2.4 million, 974% of the goal, from 9,522 backers.[20] Shipping of the Oculus Rift DK1 development kit began on 27 March 2013.[21] The DK1 used a 7-inch 1280 by 800 LCD, giving 640 by 800 pixels per eye, a horizontal field of view greater than 90 degrees, and a 1000 Hz head tracker with gyroscope, accelerometer and magnetometer.[22] On 25 March 2014 Facebook agreed to acquire Oculus VR for about $2 billion, at a time when Oculus had received more than 75,000 orders for development kits.[23]

The Oculus Rift DK2, announced in March 2014 at $350, moved to a 960 by 1080 per eye OLED display at up to 75 Hz with selectable low persistence (2 ms or 3 ms) and added an infrared camera for positional tracking.[24] In June 2014 Google introduced Google Cardboard, a low-cost viewer "literally made out of cardboard" that turned a smartphone into a VR headset.[25]

The year 2016 brought the first mass-market PC and console headsets. The Oculus Rift CV1 was released on 28 March 2016 at $599.99 with two 90 Hz OLED displays of 1080 by 1200 pixels.[26] The HTC Vive cost $799 including the headset, two wireless controllers and two location sensors, with shipments from early April 2016.[27] Sony's PlayStation VR followed in the United States on 13 October 2016 at $399 for the core headset.[28] Its single 5.7-inch 1920 by 1080 OLED panel could refresh at 90 Hz or 120 Hz.[29] In a 2016 teardown comparison, iFixit found that the Rift tracked infrared LEDs with an external camera, the Vive's sensors detected infrared light from its "Lighthouse" base stations, and PlayStation VR used visible-light LEDs.[30]

In 2019 Oculus released two headsets built on Oculus Insight, an inside-out tracking system based on simultaneous localization and mapping (SLAM) that combines camera images with data from inertial measurement units; the company described the standalone Oculus Quest as "the first consumer VR device with full six-degrees-of-freedom tracking" with tracking of both controllers built into the headset.[31] The Valve Index launched on 28 June 2019, with its full kit priced at $999.[32]

Mixed reality headsets and display glasses

The Meta Quest 3 went on sale on 10 October 2023 at $499.99 for the 128 GB model. Meta stated that its pancake lens stack gave a 40% slimmer optic profile than the Meta Quest 2, that the display reached 25 pixels per degree, and that its full-color passthrough had more than ten times the pixels of Quest 2's.[33] The Apple Vision Pro went on sale in the United States on 2 February 2024 at $3,499; Apple said its micro-OLED technology could "pack 23 million pixels into two displays, each the size of a postage stamp".[34] An updated model with the M5 chip followed on 22 October 2025, rendering 10 percent more pixels and able to raise the refresh rate to 120 Hz "for reduced motion blur when users look at their physical surroundings".[35]

On the see-through side, Microsoft confirmed in October 2024 that production of the Microsoft HoloLens 2 had ended, with updates for critical security issues continuing until 31 December 2027.[36] The Samsung Galaxy XR, the first headset for Google's Android XR platform, went on sale in the United States and South Korea on 21 October 2025 at $1,800, with 3552 by 3840 micro-OLED displays, a Qualcomm Snapdragon XR2+ Gen 2 chip and a weight of 545 grams.[37] Meta's Meta Ray-Ban Display glasses went on sale in the United States on 30 September 2025 at $799, bundled with the Meta Neural Band electromyography wristband.[38] Their display is a small fixed head-up display visible only to the right eye, with 600 by 600 pixels over about 20 degrees, 42 pixels per degree and up to 5,000 nits.[39] On 14 September 2026 Valve opened reservations for the Steam Frame at $1,059 (256 GB); the headset uses eye tracking for foveated streaming of wireless PC VR.[40]

Types

By relation to the real world

Head-mounted displays are grouped by how they relate the virtual image to the real world.

Type How it works Examples
Immersive (VR) Opaque optics block the direct view of the real world and replace it with rendered imagery.[1] Oculus Rift CV1, Valve Index
Optical see-through The real world is seen through semi-transparent mirrors or other combiners, which also reflect the computer-generated images into the eyes.[8] Sutherland's 1968 display, Microsoft HoloLens 2[41]
Video see-through (passthrough) Head-mounted cameras capture the real world, and the computer-generated images are combined electronically with the video before display.[8] Meta Quest 3, Apple Vision Pro, Samsung Galaxy XR
Display glasses and monocular head-up displays A small display, often over one eye, shows information without aiming for full immersion. Meta Ray-Ban Display[39]

The choice between optical and video see-through involves trade-offs that Rolland, Holloway and Fuchs analyzed in 1995. Video see-through systems can delay the camera image to match the delay of the computer graphics and, given a depth map of the real scene, can decide pixel by pixel whether real or virtual content occludes the other. Optical see-through systems show the real world without added delay or loss of resolution, but they blend real and virtual images uniformly with beam splitters, which makes occlusion harder, and they cannot delay the real scene, so the whole system has to be optimized for low latency. The two also fail differently: if an optical see-through display fails, the wearer still sees the real world, while a failure in a video see-through display can remove the view of the real world entirely, which the authors considered potentially "unacceptable in many applications for reasons of safety and liability".[8] A 2000 follow-up by Rolland and Fuchs compared the two approaches for medical visualization.[42] In current products the categories overlap: a single headset such as the Quest 3 runs both fully virtual applications and camera-based mixed reality.[33]

Binocular, monocular and biocular

The number and arrangement of displays defines three configurations.[1]

Configuration Description Typical use
Monocular A single display optic in front of one eye. Aviation symbology such as the IHADSS,[10] smart glasses such as Meta Ray-Ban Display[39]
Binocular A separate image for each eye, presenting slightly different views to enable stereoscopic depth. Immersive virtual reality and high-end AR
Biocular Both eyes see the same single image, with no stereo depth. Simpler viewers

Rolland and Hua note that many deployed virtual environment systems are monocular or biocular, which avoids changes in both accommodation and convergence, while binocular displays add stereopsis at the cost of a possible conflict between the two (see Health, comfort and safety).[1]

By mounting and processing

HMDs may be mounted on a headband or integrated into a helmet.[1] Consumer headsets differ in where the computing happens. Smartphone-based viewers such as Google Cardboard use the phone as display and processor.[25] Tethered headsets are driven by an external PC or game console. Standalone headsets carry their own system-on-chip, such as the Snapdragon XR2 Gen 2 in the Quest 3,[33] and some, like the Steam Frame, can also receive streamed PC VR content wirelessly.[40] The Apple Vision Pro uses a separate battery pack weighing 353 grams connected to the headset.[43]

Key components

Displays

The image source is usually a small, dense panel called a microdisplay. Rolland and Hua identify the main challenge as providing high resolution and high, uniform luminance on a reasonably small substrate, and they note that the pixel response time of a microdisplay can add to system latency.[1] A 2021 review in Light: Science & Applications lists the microdisplays used in AR as micro-LED, micro-OLED, liquid crystal on silicon (LCoS), digital micromirror devices and MEMS-based laser beam scanning; LCoS and DMD panels modulate reflected light from a separate illuminator, so self-emissive micro-LED and micro-OLED panels are usually more compact.[44] Consumer VR headsets have used both LCD and OLED panels: the Valve Index has dual 1440 by 1600 LCDs with full RGB subpixels,[45] while the Apple Vision Pro uses micro-OLED panels with a 7.5 micron pixel pitch and 23 million pixels in total.[43]

Optics

Because the display sits only centimeters from the eye, lenses are needed to let the eye focus on it and to magnify the image across the field of view; the distance between panel and lens is usually close to the focal length of the lens system.[44] Optical designs fall into non-pupil-forming eyepieces, in which the eye's own pupil serves as the system pupil and the user sees the image wherever a light path exists, and pupil-forming designs with an internal aperture that must be imaged onto the eye; Rolland and Hua give 15 to 17 mm as the preferred exit pupil size for natural eye movement, though the IHADSS used 10 mm.[1] Eye clearance also matters: they give 17 mm as the smallest clearance that allows standard eyeglasses and recommend 23 mm for most eyeglasses.[1] Valve notes that for designs above 90 degrees, "even a single millimeter of excess eye relief reduces your FOV by about 3 degrees", and it canted each lens of the Index by 5 degrees to shift some horizontal field of view from the inside to the outside.[46]

According to the 2021 review, conventional VR headsets use a transmissive lens with a focal length of about 4 cm. Fresnel lenses are thinner than conventional lenses but do not significantly reduce the distance between lens and panel, and the diffraction and stray light from their grooves degrade image quality.[44] Polarization-based folded lenses, known as pancake lenses, fold the light path three times using a half mirror and polarization optics, which allows a compact design; with two passes through the half mirror, their maximum efficiency is limited to 25% for polarized input and 12.5% for unpolarized light, and stray light from surface reflections and polarization leakage can create ghost images.[44] Meta's current lineup uses both approaches: the Quest 3 has pancake lenses and the Quest 3S Fresnel lenses.[47]

Combiners and waveguides

See-through HMDs need an optical combiner that merges the display image with light from the real world. Rolland and Hua note that see-through designs usually use a folded optical path, and that most folded designs use a dual combiner of a flat plate and a spherical mirror.[1] The 2021 review divides AR combiners into free-space designs, including birdbath optics with a beam splitter and half mirror, and waveguide combiners, in which an exit pupil expansion process enlarges the eyebox.[44] In a 2020 review of diffractive waveguide combiners, Bernard Kress and Ishan Chatterjee argue that mixed reality headsets must provide wearable comfort (weight, size, center of gravity and heat), visual comfort, vestibular comfort and social comfort, including true eye contact, without compromising immersion.[48] Microsoft lists the HoloLens 2 optics as "see-through holographic lenses (waveguides)" driven by "2k 3:2 light engines".[41] Outdoor use is demanding: Rolland and Hua cite average outdoor scene luminance of about 2000 foot-lamberts and, for aviators at altitude, sunlit snow or clouds of up to about 10,000 foot-lamberts, and the displayed image must be at least as bright as its surroundings.[1]

Tracking and sensors

Positional tracking reports the position and orientation of the head so that the rendered scene stays locked to the real world as the user moves. Headsets that track only rotation offer 3 degrees of freedom, while headsets that also track translation offer 6. Sutherland's display used mechanical and ultrasonic trackers,[2] and Rolland and Hua note that tracking errors were found to be the main contributor to visual errors in augmented reality, prompting extensive research into tracking.[1] Consumer headsets have used an inertial measurement unit alone, as in the DK1;[22] external cameras or base stations (outside-in tracking);[30] and headset cameras with SLAM (inside-out tracking).[31] The HoloLens 2 has four visible-light head-tracking cameras, two infrared eye-tracking cameras, a 1-megapixel time-of-flight depth sensor and an IMU,[41] and the Apple Vision Pro lists 12 cameras, a TrueDepth camera, a LiDAR scanner and four IMUs, with an R1 chip rated at "12-millisecond photon-to-photon latency".[43]

Eye tracking

Eye tracking cameras inside the headset measure where the user is looking. The human eye has high visual acuity only in the central fovea, which covers about 10 degrees of the field of view, so a foveated display or foveated rendering can concentrate resolution or rendering effort where the user is looking.[44] The HoloLens 2 uses eye tracking for "display optimization for 3D eye position",[41] the Apple Vision Pro has four eye-tracking cameras,[43] and the Steam Frame uses eye tracking for foveated streaming.[40]

Interpupillary distance adjustment

The optics work best when their centers line up with the wearer's pupils, so many HMDs allow interpupillary distance (IPD) adjustment. In a survey of published data, Neil Dodgson found that mean adult IPD is around 63 mm, that the vast majority of adults fall between 50 and 75 mm, that 45 to 80 mm likely covers almost all adults, and that children down to five years old have IPDs as small as about 40 mm.[49] If the IPD setting does not match the user, Road to VR notes that the scale of the virtual world can look slightly wrong and that misalignment with the lens center can reduce visual quality.[50] Rolland and Hua add that a large mismatch can increase fusional difficulty and discomfort, especially when the user's IPD is smaller than the headset setting.[1] The Valve Index offers physical adjustment from 58 to 70 mm,[45] while the Quest 3S has three lens positions and the Quest 3 continuous adjustment.[47]

Key specifications

Several figures are commonly used to compare head-mounted displays.

Specification Meaning Notes and examples
Field of view Angular extent of the visible image Valve states that every HMD has a maximum single-eye FOV set by its design, while the FOV a user actually sees depends on fit and face shape, so "it's really hard to use a single number".[46] With the eyes stationary, the combined human visual field measures about 200 degrees horizontally and 120 degrees vertically.[1] Meta lists 110 degrees horizontal and 96 degrees vertical for the Quest 3.[47]
Resolution and pixels per degree Pixels per eye, and pixels per degree of view 20/20 vision corresponds to about 1 arcminute, or 60 pixels per degree, a common goal for AR and VR displays; reaching 60 PPD across a 100 degree FOV would need about 6K resolution per eye.[44] The Quest 3 reaches 25 PPD.[47]
Refresh rate and persistence How often the image updates, and how long each frame stays lit A full-persistence display keeps its pixels lit for the whole frame, while low persistence lights them only when the scene orientation is correct.[51] The Valve Index supports 80, 90, 120 and 144 Hz.[45]
Motion-to-photon latency Time from a tracked movement to the matching photons on the display A 2020 review traces the often-quoted target of less than 20 ms to a 2013 recommendation by John Carmack and notes studies finding that people can detect latency below 17 ms.[52] Sony gave PlayStation VR's latency as less than 18 ms.[29]
Eyebox and eye relief Region in which the eye sees the full image, and distance from the last lens surface to the eye In eyepiece-based designs, more eye clearance requires larger viewing optics for a given FOV.[1]
Brightness Luminance of the virtual image, in nits See-through displays must match ambient light;[1] Meta Ray-Ban Display reaches up to 5,000 nits.[39]
Weight Mass on the head HoloLens 2: 566 g;[41] Galaxy XR: 545 g;[37] Apple Vision Pro: 750 to 800 g plus a 353 g battery.[43]

Representative head-mounted displays

The table below lists devices across eras to show how the technology has changed. Resolutions are per eye unless noted.

Device Year Type Display Field of view Refresh rate
Sutherland HMD 1968 Optical see-through, binocular Two miniature CRTs, vector graphics[2] 40 degrees[2] 3000 lines at 30 frames per second[2]
IHADSS (AH-64 Apache) Monocular helmet display[1] Symbology and video overlays[10] 40 by 30 degrees[10]
Oculus Rift DK1 2013 VR 7-inch LCD, 640 by 800[22] More than 90 degrees horizontal[22]
Oculus Rift DK2 2014 VR, positional tracking OLED, 960 by 1080[24] 60, 72, 75 Hz[24]
Oculus Rift CV1 2016 VR Two OLED, 1080 by 1200[26] 90 Hz[26]
PlayStation VR 2016 VR One 5.7-inch OLED, 1920 by 1080 total[29] 90 or 120 Hz[29]
Valve Index 2019 VR Two LCD, 1440 by 1600[45] 80 to 144 Hz[45]
Meta Quest 3 2023 Standalone VR with color passthrough 2064 by 2208, pancake lenses[47] 110 degrees horizontal, 96 vertical[47] 72, 90, 120 Hz[47]
Apple Vision Pro (M5) 2025 Video see-through MR Micro-OLED, 23 million pixels total[43] 90, 96, 100, 120 Hz[43]
Samsung Galaxy XR 2025 Video see-through MR Micro-OLED, 3552 by 3840[37] 60 to 90 Hz[37]
Meta Ray-Ban Display 2025 Monocular display glasses 600 by 600, right eye only[39] About 20 degrees[39]

Applications

Head-mounted displays are used wherever a hands-free, head-tracked or immersive view is useful.

Field Uses Notes
Gaming and entertainment VR games, video and social applications Consumer headsets for PCs and consoles, including the Rift, Vive and PlayStation VR, launched in 2016.[30]
Aviation and defense Flight and targeting symbology, sensor imagery slaved to head movement IHADSS on the AH-64 Apache;[10] F-35 helmet-mounted display.[12]
Medicine Surgical navigation and visualization A 2022 systematic review of 57 recent studies on optical see-through HMDs in surgery found the largest groups of studies in orthopedic (20) and maxillofacial (8) surgery and that Microsoft HoloLens devices were the most used; accuracy of about 2 to 5 mm had been shown in phantom models, but perception, ease of use, interaction and occlusion problems remained before wide adoption.[53]
Education and training Skills practice in simulated environments A 2017 review of 21 experimental studies found HMDs useful for spatial and visual knowledge, head-movement skills such as visual scanning, and controlling emotional responses to stressful situations, but found no advantage over less immersive methods elsewhere, sometimes because of cybersickness or distraction.[54]
Telepresence Viewing a remote scene through head-steered cameras Philco's early 1960s helmet;[6] the LEEP Cyberface telepresence system.[16]
Research Perception, display and interaction research NASA's VIEW workstation;[14] see Research directions.

Health, comfort and safety

Vergence-accommodation conflict

In normal viewing the eyes focus (accommodate) and converge on the same point. Most HMDs present their images at a single optical distance, usually either beyond 6 m (optical infinity) or about arm's length, so a binocular display asks the eyes to converge at the depth of a virtual object while focusing at a fixed distance.[1] In a 2008 study, David Hoffman, Ahna Girshick, Kurt Akeley and Martin Banks built a display with nearly correct focus cues and found that, compared with conventional stereo, it shortened the time needed to identify a stereoscopic stimulus, improved stereoacuity, reduced depth distortions and reduced viewer fatigue and discomfort.[55] The Vergence-accommodation conflict article covers the topic in detail.

Cybersickness

Users of HMDs can experience symptoms similar to motion sickness, called VR sickness or cybersickness, including eye fatigue, disorientation and nausea. A 2020 review grouped its causes into hardware, content and human factors and noted that a visually improved VR system does not necessarily reduce sickness.[56] Another 2020 review concluded that larger latencies and latency jitter can harm well-being in the form of cybersickness, and that latency differs across the screen because of the display's scan-out order.[52] A 2019 review found that the balance of evidence favors a negative relationship between presence and cybersickness.[57] In a study reported by UploadVR in 2024, 32 participants at Xi'an Jiaotong-Liverpool University reported significantly less nausea at 120 frames per second than at 60 or 90, with little further improvement at 180; UploadVR noted that the study used a single headset with an unusually wide field of view, so the result may not generalize.[58]

Eyes and long-term use

A 2017 study in Scientific Reports compared 40-minute sessions in real and virtual environments and found no evidence that the VR optical arrangement adversely affected the binocular status of young adults' eyes in the short term; choroidal thickness increased by about 10 microns after each VR session, which the authors suggested means a VR headset may not be a myopia-inducing stimulus.[59] Rolland and Hua emphasize that a secure, ergonomic headband is one of the biggest challenges of HMD design, coupled with the optical design itself.[1]

Research directions

Researchers have proposed several ways to remove the fixed focal distance of conventional HMDs. The light field stereoscope (2015) stacked liquid crystal panels to produce a factored light field that supports accommodation and retinal blur.[60] A 2017 study in PNAS used focus-tunable lenses, mechanically actuated displays and gaze tracking to provide natural focus cues and to correct common refractive errors.[61] NVIDIA's Foveated AR prototype (2019) combined a gaze-steered high-resolution foveal display with a wide peripheral display and reached 85 by 78 degrees per eye.[62] Rolland and Hua list foveal-contingent, multifocal-plane and occlusion displays as grand challenges for HMD design.[1] See Varifocal display, Light field and Holographic display for related work.

See also

References

  1. ↑ 1.00 1.01 1.02 1.03 1.04 1.05 1.06 1.07 1.08 1.09 1.10 1.11 1.12 1.13 1.14 1.15 1.16 1.17 1.18 1.19 1.20 1.21 1.22 1.23 1.24 1.25 1.26 1.27 1.28 Jannick Rolland, Hong Hua (2005). "Head-Mounted Display Systems". Encyclopedia of Optical Engineering, Taylor & Francis. https://api.creol.ucf.edu/Publications/1519.pdf. Retrieved 2026-10-13.
  2. ↑ 2.0 2.1 2.2 2.3 2.4 2.5 2.6 2.7 2.8 Ivan E. Sutherland (1968-12-09). "A head-mounted three dimensional display". Proceedings of the Fall Joint Computer Conference (AFIPS 1968), pp. 757-764. https://doi.org/10.1145/1476589.1476686. Retrieved 2026-10-13.
  3. ↑ IDC (2026-07-01). "Smart Glasses Surge as XR Market Rewrites Its Own Rules". IDC Augmented and Virtual Reality Headsets Market Insights. https://www.idc.com/promo/arvr. Retrieved 2026-10-13.
  4. ↑ Ozan Cakmakci, Jannick Rolland (2006-09). "Head-Worn Displays: A Review". Journal of Display Technology, vol. 2, no. 3, pp. 199-216. https://doi.org/10.1109/JDT.2006.879846. Retrieved 2026-10-13.
  5. ↑ 5.0 5.1 Morton L. Heilig (1960-10-04). "US2955156A - Stereoscopic-television apparatus for individual use". Google Patents. https://patents.google.com/patent/US2955156A/en. Retrieved 2026-10-13.
  6. ↑ 6.0 6.1 Armin Grasnick (2023-06-18). "Inventing the familiar: "Damocles-Headsight-View"". MIXED. https://mixed-news.com/en/invention-of-the-familiar-damocles-headsight-view/. Retrieved 2026-10-13.
  7. ↑ 7.0 7.1 "Ivan Sutherland's experimental 3-D display". Computer History Museum. https://www.computerhistory.org/revolution/artifact/356/1830. Retrieved 2026-10-13.
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  11. ↑ Hua Li, Xin Zhang, Guangwei Shi, Hemeng Qu, Yanxiong Wu, Jianping Zhang (2013-11-18). "Review and analysis of avionic helmet-mounted displays". Optical Engineering, vol. 52, no. 11, 110901. https://doi.org/10.1117/1.OE.52.11.110901. Retrieved 2026-10-13.
  12. ↑ 12.0 12.1 "Navy asks Lockheed Martin to provide electro-optical helmet-mounted displays for F-35 combat jets". Military & Aerospace Electronics. 2023-08-23. https://www.militaryaerospace.com/sensors/article/14298012/helmet-mounted-displays-f-35-combat-jets-electro-optical. Retrieved 2026-10-13.
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  53. ↑ Mitchell Doughty, Nilesh R. Ghugre, Graham A. Wright (2022). "Augmenting Performance: A Systematic Review of Optical See-Through Head-Mounted Displays in Surgery". Journal of Imaging, vol. 8, no. 7, art. 203. https://doi.org/10.3390/jimaging8070203. Retrieved 2026-10-13.
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