Managing level of detail through peripheral degradation: Effects on search performance with a head-mounted display

TL;DR

This study investigates how degrading peripheral detail in head-mounted displays affects visual search performance, finding that it can significantly reduce visual complexity without impairing task accuracy or speed.

Contribution

The paper provides empirical evidence that peripheral level-of-detail degradation can optimize visual search efficiency in head-mounted displays without performance loss.

Findings

Peripheral LOD degradation reduces visual complexity by nearly half.

Search performance remains unaffected despite significant peripheral detail reduction.

Both spatial and color domain degradations are effective in maintaining search accuracy.

Abstract

Two user studies were performed to evaluate the effect of level-of-detail (LOD) degradation in the periphery of head-mounted displays on visual search performance. In the first study, spatial detail was degraded by reducing resolution. In the second study, detail was degraded in the color domain by using grayscale in the periphery. In each study, 10 subjects were given a complex search task that required users to indicate whether or not a target object was present among distracters. Subjects used several different displays varying in the amount of detail presented. Frame rate, object location, subject input method, and order of display use were all controlled. The primary dependent measures were search time on correctly performed trials and the percentage of all trials correctly performed. Results indicated that peripheral LOD degradation can be used to reduce color or spatial visual complexity by almost half in some search tasks with out significantly reducing performance.