Head movements during visual exploration of natural images in virtual reality

Hu, Brian; Johnson-Bey, Ishmael; Sharma, Mansi; Niebur, Ernst

doi:10.1109/ciss.2017.7926138

Cited by 20 publications

(10 citation statements)

References 16 publications

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“…Head movements are synergistic when they contribute to saccades [ 39 ] and compensatory when they help stabilize gaze in the scene during fixations (vestibulo-ocular [ 39 , 41 ] and opto-kynetic [ 42 ] (Chapter 2) [ 43 ] responses). During synergistic movements, head movements are recorded even during small saccades [ 39 , 44 , 45 , 46 ]. In a free-viewing study in VR [ 47 ], we observed that head movements were much less complex compared to eye movements; possibly under the control of behavioral goals related to exploration, whereas eye movements served to analyze regions of interest.…”

Section: Introductionmentioning

confidence: 99%

Effects of Transient Loss of Vision on Head and Eye Movements during Visual Search in a Virtual Environment

2020

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Central and peripheral fields of view extract information of different quality and serve different roles during visual tasks. Past research has studied this dichotomy on-screen in conditions remote from natural situations where the scene would be omnidirectional and the entire field of view could be of use. In this study, we had participants looking for objects in simulated everyday rooms in virtual reality. By implementing a gaze-contingent protocol we masked central or peripheral vision (masks of 6 deg. of radius) during trials. We analyzed the impact of vision loss on visuo-motor variables related to fixation (duration) and saccades (amplitude and relative directions). An important novelty is that we segregated eye, head and the general gaze movements in our analyses. Additionally, we studied these measures after separating trials into two search phases (scanning and verification). Our results generally replicate past on-screen literature and teach about the role of eye and head movements. We showed that the scanning phase is dominated by short fixations and long saccades to explore, and the verification phase by long fixations and short saccades to analyze. One finding indicates that eye movements are strongly driven by visual stimulation, while head movements serve a higher behavioral goal of exploring omnidirectional scenes. Moreover, losing central vision has a smaller impact than reported on-screen, hinting at the importance of peripheral scene processing for visual search with an extended field of view. Our findings provide more information concerning how knowledge gathered on-screen may transfer to more natural conditions, and attest to the experimental usefulness of eye tracking in virtual reality.

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Section: Introductionmentioning

confidence: 99%

Effects of Transient Loss of Vision on Head and Eye Movements during Visual Search in a Virtual Environment

2020

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“…Head movement Hypothesis 2: The average head movement is higher in the instrumented bicycle experiment than in the keyboard experiment. We expect that the use of the instrumented bicycle will induce participants to inspect the environment, resulting in more head movement (26)(27). This would be due to the higher level of immersion in the environment, due to the improved design compared to the keyboard, and due to the fact that braking in case of any hazardous circumstances on the road will take longer on the instrumented bike compared to instantaneous reaction while pressing the arrows on the keyboard.…”

Section: Cycling Speedmentioning

confidence: 99%

Comparison of Cycling Behavior between Keyboard-Controlled and Instrumented Bicycle Experiments in Virtual Reality

Bogacz

Hess

Calastri

et al. 2020

Transportation Research Record

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The use of virtual reality (VR) in transport research offers the opportunity to collect behavioral data in a controlled dynamic setting. VR settings are useful in the context of hypothetical situations in which real-world data does not exist or in situations which involve risk and safety issues making real-world data collection infeasible. Nevertheless, VR studies can contribute to transport-related research only if the behavior elicited in a virtual environment closely resembles real-world behavior. Importantly, as VR is a relatively new research tool, the best-practice with regards to the experimental design is still to be established. In this paper, we contribute to a better understanding of the implications of the choice of the experimental setup by comparing cycling behavior in VR between two groups of participants in similar immersive scenarios, the first group controlling the maneuvers using a keyboard and the other group riding an instrumented bicycle. We critically compare the speed, acceleration, braking and head movements of the participants in the two experiments. We also collect electroencephalography (EEG) data to compare the alpha wave amplitudes and assess the engagement levels of participants in the two settings. The results demonstrate the ability of VR to elicit behavioral patterns in line with those observed in the real-world and indicate the importance of the experimental design in a VR environment beyond the choice of audio-visual stimuli. The findings will be useful for researchers in designing the experimental setup of VR for behavioral data collection.

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“…In synergistic motions, the head makes it possible to prepare saccades targeting anywhere in the field of view and even outside of it (see the “practical field of fixation”; Rötth, 1925 ; Von Noorden & Campos, 2002 ). Head movements are even observed accompanying small eye rotations ( Ritzmann, 1875 ; Bizzi et al., 1972 ; Einh et al., 2007 ; Hu et al., 2017) . Previous research has shown that the role of the head can be as critical as the eyes ( Lee, 1999 ; Doshi & Trivedi, 2012) .…”

Section: Introductionmentioning

confidence: 99%

The importance of peripheral vision when searching 3D real-world scenes: A gaze-contingent study in virtual reality

2021

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Visual search in natural scenes is a complex task relying on peripheral vision to detect potential targets and central vision to verify them. The segregation of the visual fields has been particularly established by on-screen experiments. We conducted a gaze-contingent experiment in virtual reality in order to test how the perceived roles of central and peripheral visions translated to more natural settings. The use of everyday scenes in virtual reality allowed us to study visual attention by implementing a fairly ecological protocol that cannot be implemented in the real world. Central or peripheral vision was masked during visual search, with target objects selected according to scene semantic rules. Analyzing the resulting search behavior, we found that target objects that were not spatially constrained to a probable location within the scene impacted search measures negatively. Our results diverge from on-screen studies in that search performances were only slightly affected by central vision loss. In particular, a central mask did not impact verification times when the target was grammatically constrained to an anchor object. Our findings demonstrates that the role of central vision (up to 6 degrees of eccentricities) in identifying objects in natural scenes seems to be minor, while the role of peripheral preprocessing of targets in immersive real-world searches may have been underestimated by on-screen experiments.

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Head movements during visual exploration of natural images in virtual reality

Cited by 20 publications

References 16 publications

Effects of Transient Loss of Vision on Head and Eye Movements during Visual Search in a Virtual Environment

Effects of Transient Loss of Vision on Head and Eye Movements during Visual Search in a Virtual Environment

Comparison of Cycling Behavior between Keyboard-Controlled and Instrumented Bicycle Experiments in Virtual Reality

The importance of peripheral vision when searching 3D real-world scenes: A gaze-contingent study in virtual reality

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