Peripheral Vision in Games

From EQUIS Lab Wiki

Contents 1 Use of Peripheral Vision for Control 2 Technologies 3 peripheral and ambient displays 4 Peripheral Vision Info 5 Basics 6 Attentive Interfaces 7 Gaze Contingent Displays 8 Eye Tracking 9 Multiplayer Collaborative Games

Use of Peripheral Vision for Control

• Danny Mann of the University of Manitoba has been investigating the use of a GPS-based peripheral vision position indicator to help in the control of tractors. The study involved modifying the placement and size of a light bar used for navigation to reduce overlap and skip. summary
• Ebrahimi and Kunov of the University of Toronto have investigated the use of peripheral vision indicators to help deaf people lip read. A pair of glasses was modified to highlight certain speech features to help gather more information about a speakers meaning while lip reading. summary2
• Oznur Ozkurt of the Interaction Design Institute Ivrea has experimented with the use of cues in the periphery to help with navigation tasks. The work is detailed in his thesis. The study involved the addition of a navigation system to a car. They attempted a display on the steering wheel, and in a seperate case a HUD. summary3
• Comstock, Jones and Pope have studied the effect of large screens on spatial orientation tasks with the hope of reducing aviation accidents. Many aviation accidents are caused by spatial disorientation. They study was to explore several display concepts that would hopefully improve attitude display, including extending certain instruments to display in the periphery.summary4
• Storming Media has studied whether presenting information in the periphery of wide-screen HUD's helps pilots with information overload. see above (same article).summary4

Technologies

Many head-mounted displays now come in the form of glasses. These typically have two small displays, one for each eye. The field of view is small - circa 25 degrees diagonal. The displays of these devices therefore do not extend into the user's peripheral vision. Examples of such VR glasses are:

• i-O Display Systems' i-Theatre
• Inition's I-glasses provides 26 degree FOV with both head and helmet mounted options.
• Chatten associates has a white paper on a head-mounted display providing a 70 degree field of view. The prototype was built for the army. The display has higher resolution in the foveal view than in the peripheral view. Currently they have a product out for the army which allows the user to place a camera at any location and look through a display from another location and see exactly what the camera sees. The camera moves when the person moves his head so it is as if you are standing where the camera is located.
• Fifth Dimension technology's displays
• Arrington Research's displays and eye trackers

Another technology involves parabolic displays, which give much wider field of view.

• Elumens' Vision Station (also described here) provides a 160 degree field of view.
• Emagin just released a new HUD called the x800 which supposedly is like looking at a 105 inch screen from 12 feet away and has a field of view of 40 degrees.

• Dr. Saul Greenberg from the university of calgary has come up with Phidgets or physical widgets to help with the creation of physical interfaces. his paper can be found here

peripheral and ambient displays

• James Sheedy of Ohio State University has performed a study comparing the effectiveness of "near-eye" displays vs traditional monitors. Near eye displays involve glasses with a monitor built into the lenses. The current problems with these displays involve motion sickness, device weight and poor resolution. summary5
• Kevin Arthur has performed a study on the effects of field of view on task performance with head-mounted displays. He defines field of vision to span 200 degrees horizontally and 150 degrees vertically. The main problems with heads up displays are simulator sickness, vection and visual-vestibular mismatch.summary6
• Kevin Arthur goes on to describe all his reasearch and the results of his experiments in his phd dissertation. Which includes precise definitions of FOV and outlines some problems with todays HMD's.summary7
• Gary Hsieh and Jennifer Mankoff of Berkley's Group for User Interface Research are investigating usability, awareness and distraction issues of displays supporting peripheral views. They have come up with a set of heuristics to test peripheral displays which examine both usability and awareness. The have currently measured the usability awareness and distraction of two peripheral displays.summary8

• Jennifer Mankoff, Gary Hsieh and others paper on the heuristic evaluation of ambient displays. The paper discusses the actual heuristics used and a compairon to Nielsons ten usability heuristics.summary9

• Jennifer Mankoff and her grad student Tara Mathews have designed a toolkit for managing attention in peripheral displays. The toolkit deals with three main ideas mainly abstraction, notification and transitions.summary10

• Tara Mathews under the supervision of Jennifer Mankoff have explored how deaf people can use peripheral displays to help them know when there are important sounds occuring such as knocks on the door or fire alarms etc. summary11

• Tara Mathews and Jennifer Mankoff have continues their research on evaluation of displays by applying activity theory as a tool to analize, design and evaluate peripheral displays.summary12

• Hiroshi Ishii and others from the tangible media group have an abstract paper about an ambient room which conveys information to its inhabitants through subtle ambient displays summary13

• C. Shawn Greene and Daphne Bevelier of of University of Rochester's Brain and cognitive science's department study the effect of video games on vision. They have found that people who play video games, especially first person shooters, have vision increases in areas such as blink recovery and peripheral vision.

• Xiaobin Shen, Andrew Vande Moere and Peter Eades make an intrusive evaluation of peripheral displaysperiphsummary1

Peripheral Vision Info

• The medical definition of Peripheral Vision
• The Volpe Driving Centre describes peripheral vision while driving as anything beyond 30 degrees.
• visionandpsychosis.net explains what is peripheral vision?
• CHI 2003 workshop on peripheral interfaces

Basics

• Some information about light and the eye
• LEGO educational division describes an experimentwhich shows that movement is detected before colour, and light, bright colours are easier to detect in the periphery.
• The university of indiana optomology department has information on some diseases that effect The peripheral retina including the definition. The peripheral retina is defined as the zone from the equator to the ora serrata and is approximately three to four disc diameters (3DD-4DD) in width.
• Wikkipedia give a good description of the Retina
• more information on the retina from university of utah webvision.
• position sense of the peripheral retina
• Darmstadt university of technology studied the effect of oncoming headlight glare on peripheral detection under a mesopic light level

Attentive Interfaces

• Dr. Roel Vertegaal has a paper describing attentive user interfaces summary14

• Dr. Roel Vertegaal has expanded on his ideas of attentive user displays and made attentive art displays which track users vision and highlight the most commonly looked at parts of art.summary15

• Mark Ashdown and Yoichi Sato from Georgia tech have been investigating attentive displays for multiple monitors summary16

• Dr. Roel Vertegaal describes his attentive user interface auramirror which displays attention.summary18

Gaze Contingent Displays

• Andrew Duchowski, Nathan Cournia, and Hunter Murphy talk about Gaze Contingent Displays which render the things on screen that are not focused on in a much lower resolution then the focused on parts. They also talk about AUI's and other related displays.GCD Summary

• Lester Loschky and George McConkey discuss the results of 6 different studies dealing with User Performance With Gaze Contingent Multiresolutional Displays GCD Summary1

Eye Tracking

• Sune Alstrub and john Hansen talk about alternatives to eyetracking with special equipment in their chi 2006 position paper summary19

• Dr. Robert Jacob talks about eye tracking and user interfaces in his article for IEEE what you see is what you getsummary17

• Dr. Robert Jacob talks about interacting with eye movements in virtual environments in his chi 2000 paper where he describes his experiment using eyes as an input device eyetrackingsummary1

• Dr. Roel Vertegaal and David Fono talk about zooming windows in their paper for chi 2005. Zooming windows is automatic zooming on windows based on eye focus. eyetrackingsummary2

• Nahman, a user centered design consultency researched using eye tracking for usability testing

Multiplayer Collaborative Games

• idea for a multiplayer collaborative jigsaw puzzle

• Multiplayer Tetris - our idea for a multiplayer collaborative tetris game with a peripheral vision component