Subtle gaze guidance for immersive environments

Immersive displays allow presentation of rich video content over a wide field of view. We present a method to boost visual importance for a selected - possibly invisible - scene part in a cluttered virtual environment. This desirable feature enables to unobtrusively guide the gaze direction of a user to any location within the immersive 360° surrounding. Our method is based on subtle gaze direction which did not include head rotations in previous work. For covering the full 360° environment and wide field of view, we contribute an approach for dynamic stimulus positioning and shape variation based on eccentricity to compensate for visibility differences across the visual field. Our approach is calibrated in a perceptual study for a head-mounted display with binocular eye tracking. An additional study validates the method within an immersive visual search task.