Real-Time 3D Peripheral View Analysis

Abstract

Human peripheral vision suffers from several limitations that differ among various regions of the visual field. Since these limitations result in natural visual impairments, many interesting intelligent user interfaces based on eye tracking could benefit from peripheral view calculations that aim to compensate for events occurring outside the very center of gaze. We present a general peripheral view calculation model which extends previous work on attention-based user interfaces that use eye gaze. An intuitive, two dimensional visibility measure based on the concept of solid angle is developed for determining to which extent an object of interest observed by a user intersects with each region of the underlying visual field model. The results are weighted considering the visual acuity in each visual field region to determine the total visibility of the object. We exemplify the proposed model in a virtual reality car simulation application incorporating a head-mounted display with integrated eye tracking functionality. In this context, we provide a quantitative evaluation in terms of a runtime analysis of the different steps of our approach. We provide also several example applications including an interactive web application which visualizes the concepts and calculations presented in this paper.