A Content-Aware Approach for Analysing Eye Movement Patterns in Virtual Reality

Observing eye movement is a direct way to analyse human’s attention. Eye movement patterns in normal environment have been widely investigated. In virtual reality (VR) environment, previous studies of eye movement patterns are mainly based on content-unrelated influential factors. Considering this issue, in this paper, a novel content-related factor is studied. One crucial kind of region of interest (ROI), namely vision-penetrable entrance, is chosen to analyse eye movement pattern differences. The results suggest that users show more interest in vision-penetrable entrances than in other regions. Furthermore, this kind of difference is identified as higher average density of fixation. As far as we know, this paper is the first attempt to study specific types of ROI in virtual reality environments. The method utilised in this paper can be applied in other ROI analysis.