In the Blink of an Eye

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.

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Eike Langbehn

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