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Radiah Rivu, Ville Mäkelä, Mariam Hassib, Yomna Abdelrahman, Florian Alt
Exploring how Saliency Affects Attention in Virtual Reality
In INTERACT '21: Proceedings of the 18th IFIP TC 13 International Conference on Human-Computer Interaction. Bari, Italy, August 30 - September 3, 2021. Springer, Berlin-Heidelberg, Germany. (bib)

We investigate how changes in the saliency of a Virtual Environment (VE) affect our visual attention during different tasks. In particular, we investigate if users are attracted to the most salient regions in the VE. This knowledge will help researchers design optimal VR environments, purposefully direct the attention of users, and avoid unintentional distractions. We conducted a user study (N=30) where participants performed tasks (video watching, object stacking, visual search, waiting) with two different saliency conditions in the virtual environment. Our findings suggest that while participants notice the differences in saliency, their visual attention is not diverted towards the salient regions when they are performing tasks.