Development of 4K UHD Binocular Video See-through Display for Manufacturing Support

The manufacturing support can present task instructions to workers interactively according to the work situation. Thereby, it is possible for the worker to perform tasks requiring advanced skills even if she/he is not an expert. In order to realize the manufacturing support, we are advancing research on displays that can present images of task instructions to workers. This paper describes the development of a high-resolution binocular video see-through display for presenting images. The video see-through display is composed of cameras, displays, and other optical components. First, the image of the work object is captured by the camera. Task instructions drawn by computer graphics (CG) on the image are drawn superimposed on the work object. Then, while watching the composite image, the worker can perform the task. A display system consisting of a camera and display compatible with full HD ($1920 \times 1080$ pixels) has been developed so far. However, the size of one pixel of the presentation image is almost the same as the gap width of visual acuity 0.7 of Landolt ring used in visual acuity test. If a person with visual acuity 1.2 watches the presented image, the resolution of the presented image is still low. If the resolution of the presented image can be further increased, more precise tasks can be performed, so that it can be applied to more manufacturing applications. In this paper, to realize higher resolution image presentation, a binocular video see-through display system prototyped using a 4K resolution (3820 x 2160 pixels) camera and display is introduced. Then, in order to confirm its basic effectiveness, the evaluation results of the depth perception using the operators are reported.