Short Paper: Exploring the Object Relevance of a Gaze Animation Model

Models for animating the eyes of virtual characters often focus on making the face appear natural and believable. There has been relatively little work in computer graphics that investigates the relevance of the objects of interest (gaze targets). In this paper, a gaze animation model has been constructed that allocates visual attention to relevant targets from objects that are within the virtual character's field of view in an immersive 3D virtual environment. Relevance is determined by proximity, eccentricity, changes in orientation and velocity of objects in the virtual character's environment. In this paper, two tasks were designed to test the relevance of the objects selected by the gaze animation model during the tasks. Eye tracking data obtained from six human subjects provided benchmark data for measuring the efficiency of the model in picking relevant objects. The gaze animation model largely outperformed a random selection algorithm in predicting the real targets/objects of users' interests within the virtual environment.

[1]  Anatole Lécuyer,et al.  A real-time visual attention model for predicting gaze point during first-person exploration of virtual environments , 2010, VRST '10.

[2]  Laurent Itti,et al.  Realistic avatar eye and head animation using a neurobiological model of visual attention , 2004, SPIE Optics + Photonics.

[3]  Junichi Hoshino,et al.  Head‐eye Animation Corresponding to a Conversation for CG Characters , 2007, Comput. Graph. Forum.

[4]  Zhigang Deng,et al.  Natural Eye Motion Synthesis by Modeling Gaze-Head Coupling , 2009, 2009 IEEE Virtual Reality Conference.

[5]  J. Henderson,et al.  High-level scene perception. , 1999, Annual review of psychology.

[6]  Mel Slater,et al.  An Eye Gaze Model for Dyadic Interaction in an Immersive Virtual Environment: Practice and Experience , 2004, Comput. Graph. Forum.

[7]  Norman I. Badler,et al.  Eyes alive , 2002, ACM Trans. Graph..

[8]  Robin Wolff,et al.  Communicating Eye Gaze across a Distance without Rooting Participants to the Spot , 2008, 2008 12th IEEE/ACM International Symposium on Distributed Simulation and Real-Time Applications.

[9]  A. L. I︠A︡rbus.  Eye Movements and Vision , 1967 .

[10]  Helena Grillon,et al.  Simulating gaze attention behaviors for crowds , 2009 .

[11]  Sungkil Lee,et al.  Real-Time Tracking of Visually Attended Objects in Virtual Environments and Its Application to LOD , 2009, IEEE Transactions on Visualization and Computer Graphics.

[12]  Anthony Steed,et al.  A saliency-based method of simulating visual attention in virtual scenes , 2009, VRST '09.

[13]  Soraia Raupp Musse,et al.  Providing expressive gaze to virtual animated characters in interactive applications , 2008, CIE.