“Perception of optical flow and geometric field of view” by Adetiloye, Wa and Mourant

Gibson [1979] demonstrated a pattern of optical flow as an observer moves through an environment. The rate of this optical flow increases with offset from straight ahead and decreases with distance in front of the observer. The point of no optical flow has been called the “focus of expansion” and specifies the direction of travel. A recent study [Tan et al. 2003] found gender specific navigation benefits come from the presence of optical flow cues. They found that the present of optical flow cues provided a performance advantage when navigating 3D environments. We will investigate optical flow on a standard monitor which is often used as a display for driving simulators. The Geometric Field of View (GFOV) of the 3D driving environment is specified in software. The GFOV is often larger than the observer’s display FOV. This results in image minification.

1. Gibson, J. J. 1979. The Ecological Approach to Visual Perception. Houghton Mifflin: Boston, MA.
2. Tan, D. S., Czerwinski, M., Robertson, G. G. 2003. Women Go With the (Optical) Flow. In Proceedings CHI 2003 Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems, 209–215.