Speaker
Description
Nowadays, conducting high-energy physics experiments depend on energetic and multi-spectral lasers. However, a laser is a dangerous light source that could rapidly cause permanent damage to human eyes. Currently, researchers at advanced optics laboratories at particle accelerator facilities use safety goggles based on optical density filters as eye protectors to reduce the amount of laser exposure to their eyes. Such laser safety goggles can filter up to 99% of all the visible light, rendering researchers working in hazardous and complex laboratory environments effectively blind. Moreover, It is not possible to design a conventional laser safety goggle for full-band laser protection as it would require filtering all the visible light.
In this work, we present a novel laser eye protection method based on a stereoscopic video see-through head-mounted display (VST-HMD). With our setup, users can perceive the real environment from virtual reality (VR) headset through a stereoscopic video live stream of the environment. Our method can successfully avoid any direct laser exposure to human eyes, thus, providing full-band laser protection even for class 4 and class 3B lasers. We conduct an empirical user study at the injector laser laboratory at the Deutsches Elektronen-Synchrotron (DESY), where we evaluate the usability, perceived safety, advantages, and limitations of using VST-HMDs as laser safety goggles. 18 participants including 14 laser experts evaluated the current prototype. The user study results not only indicate that the complex and hazardous working conditions at high-energy laser laboratories could be significantly improved with mixed reality (MR) technology but also highlight the potentials of this important application domain that is currently largely unexplored in the MR research community.
