Design of A Virtual Environment That Employs Attention-Driven Interaction and Prioritization

Abstract

This paper presents the design of a virtual environment that enhances immersive feeling and provides natural interaction experience while reducing resource requirements. The enabling mechanism is encapsulated in an attention model, its interaction control engine, and attention-driven object prioritization. Attention for a particular sense is modeled using an attention space that comprises attention cones and attention vectors. The model applies to multiple senses such as sight and hearing. The interaction control engine accounts for sensing, focusing, drift and lock-in phases of attention, and allows users to interact with avatar and non-avatar objects through gaze intermixed with explicit activation of interaction-control UI objects. The priority computation first generates basic priorities using the attention model. It can then selectively take into account participants’ profiles, needs raised from social interaction, the cost structure of an application, and specification from content development. As a result, it generates higher priorities for the objects that are more important to the user and to the application. The priorities can be used to determine which objects to be communicated over the network at which levels of quality and to determine which objects to render at which levels of quality. This in turn may increase scalability of the system in addition to enhancing immersive and natural user experience in virtual environments.