Exploring peripheral LOD change detections during interactive gaming tasks

Computer games require players to interact with scenes while performing various tasks. In this paper an experimental game framework was developed to measure players perception to level of detail (LOD) changes in 3D models (for example a bunny), as shown in Figure 1. These models were unrelated to the task assigned to the player and located away from the area in which the task was being accomplished. An interactive task, such as a point and shoot game, triggers a top-down vision process. Performing a specific task can result in inattentional blindness (IB) for the player, which is the phenomenon of not being able to perceive things that are in plain sight. IB can allow for substantial simplifications of the objects in the scene unrelated to the task at hand. In this paper five experiments were conducted exploring peripheral LOD change detections during an interactive gaming task. In three of the five experiments different level of awareness for the same task were tested and it was found that only participants being fully aware of the 3D LOD changes were able to detect about 15% of them during the game. In the other two experiments and with the players fully aware of the LOD changes, the distance at which they were able to detect each change of resolution was measured, with different number of LOD levels used in both experiments.