“Subtle Gaze Direction” by Bailey, McNamara, Sudarsanam and Grimm

This article presents a novel technique that combines eye-tracking with subtle image-space modulation to direct a viewer’s gaze about a digital image. We call this paradigm subtle gaze direction. Subtle gaze direction exploits the fact that our peripheral vision has very poor acuity compared to our foveal vision. By presenting brief, subtle modulations to the peripheral regions of the field of view, the technique presented here draws the viewer’s foveal vision to the modulated region. Additionally, by monitoring saccadic velocity and exploiting the visual phenomenon of saccadic masking, modulation is automatically terminated before the viewer’s foveal vision enters the modulated region. Hence, the viewer is never actually allowed to scrutinize the stimuli that attracted her gaze. This new subtle gaze directing technique has potential application in many areas including large scale display systems, perceptually adaptive rendering, and complex visual search tasks.

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