Gaze-Controlled Dynamic Blurring in Immersive Games

GazeHD: Towards Measuring Effect of Depth of Field Controlled by Eye Tracking in 3D environments

This is a research collaboration with Marc Anthony Berrends, Nuwan T Attygalle, Matjaž Kljun and Klen čopič Pucihar.

Depth of Field (DoF) has been used in 3D software to imitate realistic vision to improve immersion and depth perception on 2D displays. However, traditional methods of introducing DoF use fixed focus point which is usually located in the center of the screen. This may lead to unwanted blur that could affect user immersion and game satisfaction. In this paper, we present \textit{GazeHD}, a dynamic DoF system that uses eye tracking in order to actively focus at the position of user gaze whilst blurring other parts of the screen based on geometry of 3D environment. We evaluate dynamic DoF by running a user study (n=5) including a tunnel test and a 3D game demonstration. The results show DoF does not improve depth perception. This was true for both mouse controlled and eye tracking controlled DoF. However users perceived higher immersion which also persisted in complex 3D scenes such as high fidelity first person video games.

Update! Our paper was accepted and was presented in the recent HCI 2022 Conference. Open access PDF can be found here.