Monocular Presentation Attenuates Change Blindness During the Use of Augmented Reality

Abstract

Augmented reality (AR) is an emerging technology in which information is superimposed onto the real world directly in front of observers. AR images may behave as distractors because they are inside the observer’s field of view and may cause observers to overlook important information in the real world. This kind of overlooking of events or objects is known as “change blindness.” In change blindness, a distractor may cause someone to overlook a change between an original image and a modified image. In the present study, we investigated whether change blindness occurs when AR is used and whether the AR presentation method influences change blindness. An AR image was presented binocularly or monocularly as a distractor in a typical flicker paradigm. In the binocular presentation, the AR image was presented to the both of the participants’ eyes, so, it was not different from the typical flicker paradigm. By contrast, in the monocular presentation, the AR image was presented to only one eye. Therefore, it was hypothesized that if participants could observe the real-world image through the eye to which the AR image was not presented, change blindness would be avoided because the moment of change itself could be observed. In addition, the luminance of the AR image was expected to influence the ease to observe the real world because the AR image is somewhat translucent. Hence, the AR distractor had three luminance conditions (high, medium, and low), and we compared how many alternations were needed to detect changes among the conditions. Result revealed that more alternations were needed in the binocular presentation and in the high luminance condition. However, in all luminance conditions in the monocular presentation, the number of alternations needed to detect the change was not significantly different from that when the AR distractor was not presented. This result indicates that the monocular presentation could attenuate change blindness, and this might be because the observers’ visual attention is attracted to the location where the change has occurred automatically.

Perceptual and cognitive processes in augmented reality – comparison between binocular and monocular presentations

“…Qian et al (2019) reported that, among most AR equipment, users preferred binocular AR systems to monocular ones because binocular rivalry annoyed users in the case of monocular AR. Thus, even though monocular AR has some advantage (Kitamura et al, 2014(Kitamura et al, , 2015(Kitamura et al, , 2019, it might depend on the characteristics of the task.…”

“…Two types of methods are used in AR systems: binocular presentation and monocular presentation (Bayle et al, 2019 ; Kitamura et al, 2014 , 2015 ; Kitamura et al, 2019 ; Sasaki et al, 2010 ). With binocular AR, information is presented to both eyes of the user, and with monocular presentation, it is presented to only one of their eyes.…”

“…Kitamura et al ( 2015 ) reported that monocular AR leads to higher accuracy in a tracing task compared with binocular AR when an AR image covered the real world. Furthermore, Kitamura et al ( 2019 ) investigated “change blindness” in AR to compare binocular presentation and monocular presentation. Change blindness is a phenomenon that occurs when two slightly different images are presented sequentially and a distractor stimulus is presented between them, and the observer often overlooks the change between the two images (Jensen et al, 2011 ; Rensink et al, 1997 ).…”

“…Change blindness is a phenomenon that occurs when two slightly different images are presented sequentially and a distractor stimulus is presented between them, and the observer often overlooks the change between the two images (Jensen et al, 2011 ; Rensink et al, 1997 ). In Kitamura et al ( 2019 ), the distractor was an AR image that was presented binocularly or monocularly. The results revealed that participants could detect the change in the monocular condition as fast as when the distractor was not presented, revealing that change blindness had not occurred; however, a much longer duration was needed to detect the change in the binocular condition.…”

Head mounted display based augmented reality device for medical applications

“…Changes appear to be much easier to detect in the monocular presentation than in the binocular presentation. Additionally, the changes remained at the same ease of detection at all levels of AR device luminance for the monocular presentation [6]. Therefore, the monocular presentation was chosen for this design.…”