Change Blindness Phenomena for Stereoscopic Projection Systems

In visual perception, change blindness describes the phenomenon that persons viewing a visual scene may apparently fail to detect significant changes in that scene. These phenomena have been observed in both computer generated imagery and real-world scenes. Several studies have demonstrated that change blindness effects occur primarily during visual disruptions such as blinks or saccadic eye movements. However, until now the influence of stereoscopic vision on change blindness has not been studied thoroughly in the context of visual perception research. In this paper we introduce change blindness techniques for stereoscopic projection systems, providing the ability to substantially modify a virtual scene in a manner that is difficult for observers to perceive. We evaluate techniques for passive and active stereoscopic viewing and compare the results to those of monoscopic viewing conditions. For stereoscopic viewing conditions, we find that change blindness phenomena can be applied with a larger magnitude as compared to monoscopic viewing of a scene. We have also evaluated the potential of the presented techniques for allowing abrupt, and yet significant, changes of a stereoscopically displayed virtual reality environment.

@InProceedings\{SBHW10,
  author       = "Steinicke, Frank and Bruder, Gerd and Hinrichs, Klaus H. and Willemsen, Pete",
  title        = "Change Blindness Phenomena for Stereoscopic Projection Systems",
  booktitle    = "Proceedings of IEEE Virtual Reality (VR)",
  pages        = "187--194",
  year         = "2010",
  publisher    = "IEEE Press",
  url          = "http://basilic.informatik.uni-hamburg.de/Publications/2010/SBHW10"
}