The Effect of Time Pressure on Visual Search Eye Tracking Metrics in Virtual Reality

Abstract

The study of visual search has focused on various guiding factors, but less attention has been given to how environmental factors affect visual search in virtual reality (VR). The visual search literature has primarily been based on 2D laboratory tasks, which lack the complexity of real-life search tasks. Thus, this study studies the effect of time pressure on visual search in a naturalistic environment. To do that, participants were immersed in a virtual living room using VR and tasked with finding objects under a time constraint. Eye gaze data was collected, and convex hull volumes and scanning rates were calculated and analyzed. The results show that time pressure reduced convex hull volume and increased scanning rate, indicating faster search speed and a gaze tunneling effect. Understanding how time pressure affects visual search can help improve training strategies and design better user interfaces for visual search critical domains.