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Passthrough Rigidity: The Behavioral and Visuomotor Costs of Mediated Perception
arxiv.orgpaper

Passthrough Rigidity: The Behavioral and Visuomotor Costs of Mediated Perception

A large-scale (N=110) within-subject HCI study measuring the behavioral, oculomotor, and physiological costs of video passthrough head-mounted displays versus natural viewing during a block assembly task. The authors find a four-fold suppression of rotational head velocity and decoupled head-gaze coordination under passthrough, terming this "Passthrough Rigidity" — a shift toward motor caution and oculomotor compensation that correlates with worse task performance, increased ocular strain, and cognitive load, offering a quantitative framework for improving future XR device comfort.

TL;DR A 110-person study finds video passthrough VR induces measurable motor caution ("Passthrough Rigidity") and oculomotor strain that degrade comfort and performance versus natural vision.
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What it claims

Current video-passthrough HMDs impose a biomechanical cost that persists even as resolution and latency improve — so the unsolved "comfort" problem is not primarily a hardware-fidelity problem. In a within-subject study (N=110) comparing natural vs. passthrough viewing during a block-assembly task, users under passthrough suppress rotational head velocity roughly four-fold and decouple head–gaze coordination, an adaptive "motor caution" the authors name Passthrough Rigidity.

The distinction the summary blurs: the abstract states task performance is preserved — the cost lands on comfort and biomechanical efficiency, not (primarily) on the task outcome. The correlation with "poorer task performance" is between the kinematic shifts and performance, not a claim that passthrough tanked completion. Read the paper before treating this as "passthrough makes people worse at tasks."

Evidence

The page is abstract-only. The concrete markers it names:

  • ~4× suppression of rotational head velocity under passthrough.
  • Head–gaze decoupling, with the information-gathering burden shifting to the eyes: longer fixation durations and restricted visual search patterns.
  • Physiological cost: significant reduction in blink duration, plus increased self-reported ocular strain and cognitive load.

No effect sizes, confidence intervals, or per-metric numbers beyond the 4× figure appear on this page — they are in the PDF/HTML, not the abstract.

How to use it

The study contributes a synchronized multimodal protocol capturing oculomotor + kinematic + physiological data during a hand-eye-coordination task — usable as an evaluation framework for XR device comfort rather than a shippable artifact. The abstract states data is available (linked from the arXiv page). Submitted 21 Sep 2026 (v1); author Markus D. Solbach.

Limits

  • Abstract-only page: metrics beyond the 4× head-velocity figure, the protocol details, hardware used, and statistical results must be pulled from the PDF.
  • Single task type (block assembly); generalization to other XR workloads is untested per the abstract.
  • Findings are correlational between kinematics and performance/strain; the abstract does not claim a causal comfort intervention, only a framework for evaluating one.

Organisations named here

  • Markus D. Solbach

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