In the Blink of an Eye – Leveraging Blink-Induced Suppression for Imperceptible Position and Orientation Redirection in Virtual Reality
Immersive computer-generated environments (aka virtual reality, VR) are
limited by the physical space around them, e. g., enabling natural walking
in VR is only possible by perceptually-inspired locomotion techniques such
as redirected walking (RDW). We introduce a completely new approach to
imperceptible position and orientation redirection that takes advantage of
the fact that even healthy humans are functionally blind for circa ten percent
of the time under normal circumstances due to motor processes preventing
light from reaching the retina (such as eye blinks) or perceptual processes
suppressing degraded visual information (such as blink-induced suppression). During such periods of missing visual input, change blindness occurs,
which denotes the inability to perceive a visual change such as the motion of
an object or self-motion of the observer. We show that this phenomenon can
be exploited in VR by synchronizing the computer graphics rendering system with the human visual processes for imperceptible camera movements,
in particular to implement position and orientation redirection. We analyzed
human sensitivity to such visual changes with detection thresholds, which
revealed that commercial off-the-shelf eye trackers and head-mounted displays suffice to translate a user by circa 4 - 9 cm and rotate the user by circa
2 - 5 degrees in any direction, which could be accumulated each time the
user blinks. Moreover, we show the potential for RDW, whose performance
could be improved by approximately 50 % when using our technique.
Images and movies
BibTex references
@InProceedings{LSLWB18, author = "Langbehn, Eike and Steinicke, Frank and Lappe, Markus and Welch, Gregory F. and Bruder, Gerd", title = "In the Blink of an Eye \^a€“ Leveraging Blink-Induced Suppression for Imperceptible Position and Orientation Redirection in Virtual Reality", booktitle = "ACM Transactions on Graphics (TOG)", volume = "37.4", pages = "66", year = "2018", url = "http://basilic.informatik.uni-hamburg.de/Publications/2018/LSLWB18" }