Transsaccadic Awareness of Scene Transformations in a 3D Virtual Environment

In gaze-contingent displays, the viewer’s eye movement data are processed in real-time to adjust the graphical content. To provide a high-quality user experience, these graphical updates must occur with minimum delay. Such updates can be used to introduce imperceptible changes in virtual camera pose in applications such as networked gaming, collaborative virtual reality and redirected walking. For such applications, perceptual saccadic suppression can help to hide the graphical artifacts. We investigated whether the visibility of these updates depends on the type of image transformation. Users viewed 3D scenes in which the displacement of a target object triggered them to generate a vertical or horizontal saccade, during which a translation or rotation was applied to the virtual camera used to render the scene. After each trial, users indicated the direction of the scene change in a forced-choice task. Results show that type and size of the image transformation affected change detectability. During horizontal or vertical saccades, rotations along the roll axis were the most detectable, while horizontal and vertical translations were least noticed. We confirm that large 3D adjustments to the scene viewpoint can be introduced unobtrusively and with low latency during saccades, but the allowable extent of the correction varies with the transformation applied.