Change Blindness in 3D Virtual Reality
This research addresses change blindness in VR for cognitive psychology and human-computer interaction, but it is incremental as it extends previous findings to 3D environments.
The study investigated change blindness in 3D virtual reality, finding that up to 25% of changes were undetected with a mean search time of 27 seconds, and changes in the background led to significantly lower detection success and more change cycles compared to the foreground.
In the present change blindness study subjects explored stereoscopic three dimensional (3D) environments through a virtual reality (VR) headset. A novel method that tracked the subjects' head movements was used for inducing changes in the scene whenever the changing object was out of the field of view. The effect of change location (foreground or background in 3D depth) on change blindness was investigated. Two experiments were conducted, one in the lab (n = 50) and the other online (n = 25). Up to 25% of the changes were undetected and the mean overall search time was 27 seconds in the lab study. Results indicated significantly lower change detection success and more change cycles if the changes occurred in the background, with no differences in overall search times. The results confirm findings from previous studies and extend them to 3D environments. The study also demonstrates the feasibility of online VR experiments.