Passthrough Rigidity: The Behavioral and Visuomotor Costs of Mediated Perception

Abstract

Broad public adoption of head-mounted displays using video passthrough remains elusive despite significant market investment. A precise understanding of why users experience persistent discomfort even as hardware factors such as resolution and latency have dramatically improved remains an open issue. This paper investigates the impact of viewing the world through video passthrough systems on human behavioral and physiological patterns through a large-scale multimodal study. We developed a novel protocol to capture synchronized oculomotor, kinematic, and physiological data during a block assembly task requiring complex hand-eye coordination. Using a within-subject design (N=110), we evaluated both natural and passthrough viewing conditions. Our results reveal a four-fold suppression of rotational head velocity and a pronounced decoupling of head-gaze coordination. This suggests motor caution being employed as an adaptive strategy - which we term "Passthrough Rigidity". This phenomenon appears to shift the information-gathering burden to the oculomotor system, resulting in significantly longer fixation durations and restricted visual search patterns. These kinematic shifts directly correlate with poorer task performance and measurable physiological cost, evidenced by a significant reduction in blink duration and increased reports of ocular strain and cognitive load. We conclude that current passthrough implementations induce a measurable shift from flexible exploration to motor caution, where task performance is preserved at the cost of user comfort and biomechanical efficiency. These findings provide a novel quantitative framework for evaluating and improving future XR devices, establishing that resolving "comfort" for passthrough requires addressing the deep-seated biomechanical compensations caused by mediated perception. Data available at https://data.nvision.eecs.yorku.ca/Passthrough