Comparison of unobtrusive visual guidance methods in an immersive dome environment

Abstract

In this paper, we evaluate various image-space modulation techniques that aim to unobtrusively guide viewers’ attention. While previous evaluations mainly target desktop settings, we examine their applicability to ultra wide field of view immersive environments, featuring technical characteristics expected for future-generation head-mounted displays. A custom-built, high-resolution immersive dome environment with high-precision eye tracking is used in our experiments. We investigate gaze guidance success rate and unobtrusiveness of five different techniques. Our results show promising guiding performance for four of the tested methods. With regard to unobtrusiveness we find that — while no method remains completely unnoticed — many participants do not report any distractions. The evaluated methods show promise to guide users’ attention also in wide field of virtual environment applications, e.g. virtually guided tours or field operation training.