Subtle Cueing For Improving Depth Perception in Virtual Reality

Understanding an environment relies significantly on the capabilities of the human sensory system, with visual perception serving as the primary source of information for defining spatial relationships and estimating distances. The visual system relies on cues that occur naturally in the real world, through light interacting with objects in a scene. Each of these natural cues offers only partial information and may lead to bias and conflicts, especially when the cues are ambiguous. Virtual Reality (VR) environments challenge naturally occurring depth cues with discrepancies in perspective and variations in light and shadow depiction, leading to potential confusion in depth perception. On the other hand, VR also offers an opportunity to isolate cues and study depth judgments, to gain a deeper understanding of the effect of cues. In this paper, we introduce artificial subtle cues to extend and enhance natural depth information. Results suggest that depth prediction accuracy and possibly attention to spatial relationships can be enhanced by augmenting artificial depth cues over the natural ones. However, while explicit depth cues are reasonably well understood, they may disturb the overall visual appearance. In contrast, our results also show a significant improvement in depth estimation through our subtle cue (blur), in the absence of the participants’ subjective awareness of the artificial cue augmentation. This suggests that introducing an augmented depth cue, such as blur manipulation, can be effectively used as a form of subtle depth cueing.In 23rd IEEE International Symposium on Mixed and Augmented Reality: ISMAR 2023,