Peripheral view calculation in virtual reality applications

Abstract

We present an application based on 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. We determine 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 (thereby considering the visual acuity in each visual field) to determine the total visibility of the object. As a proof of concept, we exemplify the proposed model in a virtual reality application which incorporates a head-mounted display with integrated eye tracking functionality. In this context, we implement several proactive system behaviors including contextual information presentation with an adaptive level of detail and attention guidance; the latter is implemented by detecting visual acuity limitations or attention drifts.