Visual Attention for Significantly Influencing the Perception of Virtual Environments

Abstract

The Human Visual System (HVS) is a key part of the rendering pipeline. The human eye is only capable of sensing image detail in a 2 foveal region, relying on rapid eye movements, or saccades, to jump between points of interest. These points of interest are prioritised based on the saliency of the objects in the scene or the task the user is performing. These ”glimpses” of a scene are then assembled by the HVS into a coherent, but inevitably imperfect, visual perception of the environment. In this process, much detail, which the HVS deems unimportant, may literally go unnoticed. In this paper we use knowledge of the HVS to influence what our attention is attracted to in computer graphics imagery, and thus what we actually perceive in those images. We influence the affinity of subjects towards an object based on the complexity of the context that object is put into. The images are rendered using the Radiance lighting simulation system. In this way, we are able to significantly influence users’ preferences in an e-commerce application. Detailed psychophysical studies are used to validate our approach.