Varying rendering fidelity by exploiting human change blindness

The complexity of most virtual environments prevents them being rendered in real time even on modern graphics hardware. Knowledge of the visual system of the user viewing the environment may be used to significantly reduce image computation times. In this paper, we demonstrate the principle of Change Blindness, a major side effect of brief visual disruptions, including an eye saccade, a flicker, or a blink, where portions of the scene that have changed simultaneously with the visual disruption go unnoticed to the viewer. The onset of the visual disruption inhibits visual attention by swamping the user’s local motion signals, short-circuiting the automatic system that normally draws attention to the change location. Without automatic control, attention is controlled entirely by slower, higher-level mechanisms in the visual system, that search the scene, object by object, until attention finally focuses on the object that is changing. Previous work in perception-based rendering has ex...

• Type: Conference
• Year: 2003
• Where: GRAPHITE
• Authors: Kirsten Cater, Alan Chalmers, Colin Dalton
• Keywords: GRAPHITE 2003, Visual, Visual Disruption, Visual System