Comparative Analysis of Change Blindness in Virtual Reality and Augmented Reality Environments

TL;DR

This study compares change blindness in VR and AR environments through experiments, revealing how different visual disruptions and object changes affect detection speed and accuracy.

Contribution

It provides the first formal comparison of change blindness phenomena between VR and AR environments with controlled experiments.

Findings

Flickering leads to faster change detection than Head-Turning.

Objects that disappear are detected more quickly than color or size changes.

Participants show higher detection rates in VR compared to AR.

Abstract

Change blindness is a phenomenon where an individual fails to notice alterations in a visual scene when a change occurs during a brief interruption or distraction. Understanding this phenomenon is specifically important for the technique that uses a visual stimulus, such as Virtual Reality (VR) or Augmented Reality (AR). Previous research had primarily focused on 2D environments or conducted limited controlled experiments in 3D immersive environments. In this paper, we design and conduct two formal user experiments to investigate the effects of different visual attention-disrupting conditions (Flickering and Head-Turning) and object alternative conditions (Removal, Color Alteration, and Size Alteration) on change blindness detection in VR and AR environments. Our results reveal that participants detected changes more quickly and had a higher detection rate with Flickering compared to Head-Turning. Furthermore, they spent less time detecting changes when an object disappeared compared to changes in color or size. Additionally, we provide a comparison of the results between VR and AR environments.