Visual attention based information culling for Distributed Virtual Environments

Abstract

The central goal in Distributed Virtual Environments (DVEs) is to provide an experience of the shared world that is perceptually plausible for the immersed user. This has to be achieved in the face of network issues such as bandwidth limitations and latencies which make total synchronism impossible. Techniques have been devised to help; some optimise network use by limiting what is transmitted, others try to disguise the effects of network 'glitches' at the user's client machine -for example smoothing policies. To date such techniques tend to be system-based rather than user-oriented. Yet there is an active body of psychological research, for example in visual attention, which has successfully been employed by the graphics community to yield better perceived results for a given resource. Immersive DVEs are even more critically dependent upon the users' perceived experience. We may expect therefore that such 'psychologically' oriented approaches have even more to offer here. In this paper a visual attention model which exploits the peculiarities of the human visual system is presented. It is based on previous work, and on a series of carefully designed experiments which are used to guide the implementation of the model and to design architectures for DVEs. The proposed architectures are then tested using different DVE experimental applications, which include a highly populated virtual city. The results demonstrate that the characteristics of the human visual system can be exploited to improve network usage and generate a more perceptually plausible environment in the face of incomplete synchronisation.

Interest management for distributed virtual environments

“…A psychologically oriented approach for visibility-based interest management was proposed in Beeharee et al [2003]. This approach is based on a number of visual attention models that exploit the fact that only feature information (e.g., colour, orientation, and participant activity) can catch the attention of a human.…”

User experiences with web-based 3D virtual travel destination marketing portals

“…Thus, we suggested that they should be made to look more interactive to draw user attention to them. Visual attention process has been studied extensively within cognitive science, neurology and psychology, but also within VEs especially on taskoriented VEs, such as interactive 3D games (Beeharee et al, 2003), (Bernhard et al, 2010), (El-Nasr & Yan, 2006). To enhance interactivity of 3D elements, Beeharee et al (2003) suggest that highly contrasting colour and object orientation changes compared to their neighbours are most likely to gain visual attention from the user.…”

Frequent layer switching for perceived quality improvements of coarse-grained scalable video

“…1 The encoder was configured to generate streams in the scalable high profile with one base layer and one coarse-grained scalable or MGS enhancement layer, a GOP size of 4 frames with hierarchical B-frames, an intra period of 12 frames, inter-layer prediction and CABAC encoding. Note that SVC defines the set of pictures anchored by two successive key pictures together with the first key picture as a group of picture, where key pictures are usually encoded as P-frames within an intra period, see [13].…”

“…Visual acuity in human's foveal field-of-vision decreases from the center towards the outside while sensitivity to motion effects increases [1,9,12]. On mobile screens, the complete screen is in the central high acuity region and therefore detail is resolved throughout the displayed image at almost the same fidelity.…”