Change Blindness Phenomena for Virtual Reality Display Systems.

Steinicke Frank, Bruder Gerd, Hinrichs Klaus, Willemsen Pete

Zusammenfassung

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 obser ved in both computer generated imager y 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 ar ticle we introduce change blindness techniques for stereoscopic vir tual reality (VR) systems, providing the ability to substantially modify a virtual scene in a manner that is difficult for observers to perceive. We evaluate techniques for semi-immersive VR systems, i. e., a passive and active stereoscopic projection system as well as an immersive VR system, i. e., a head-mounted display, and compare the results to those of monoscopic viewing conditions. For stereoscopic viewing conditions, we found that change blindness phenomena occur with the same magnitude as in monoscopic viewing conditions. Furthermore, we have evaluated the potential of the presented techniques for allowing abrupt, and yet significant, changes of a stereoscopically displayed virtual reality environment.