A Psychophysical Study of Fixation Behavior in a Computer Game

Veronica Sundstedt, Efstathios Stavrakis, Michael Wimmer, Erik Reinhard
A Psychophysical Study of Fixation Behavior in a Computer Game
In ACM Symposium on Applied Perception in Graphics and Visualization 2008, pages 43-50. August 2008.
[ draft]
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Abstract

Prediction of gaze behavior in gaming environments can be a tremendously useful asset to game designers, enabling them to improve gameplay, selectively increase visual fidelity, and optimize the distribution of computing resources. The use of saliency maps is currently being advocated as the method of choice for predicting visual attention, crucially under the assumption that no specific task is present. This is achieved by analyzing images for low-level features such as motion, contrast, luminance, etc. However, the majority of computer games are designed to be easily understood and pose a task readily apparent to most players. Our psychophysical experiment shows that in a task-oriented context such as gaming, the predictive power of saliency maps at design time can be weak. Thus, we argue that a more involved protocol utilizing eye tracking, as part of the computer game design cycle, can be sufficiently robust to succeed in predicting fixation behavior of players.

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@inproceedings{SUNDSTEDT-2008-ASF,
  title =      "A Psychophysical Study of Fixation Behavior in a Computer
               Game",
  author =     "Veronica Sundstedt and Efstathios Stavrakis and Michael
               Wimmer and Erik Reinhard",
  year =       "2008",
  abstract =   "Prediction of gaze behavior in gaming environments can be a
               tremendously useful asset to game designers, enabling them
               to improve gameplay, selectively increase visual fidelity,
               and optimize the distribution of computing resources. The
               use of saliency maps is currently being advocated as the
               method of choice for predicting visual attention, crucially
               under the assumption that no specific task is present. This
               is achieved by analyzing images for low-level features such
               as motion, contrast, luminance, etc. However, the majority
               of computer games are designed to be easily understood and
               pose a task readily apparent to most players. Our
               psychophysical experiment shows that in a task-oriented
               context such as gaming, the predictive power of saliency
               maps at design time can be weak. Thus, we argue that a more
               involved protocol utilizing eye tracking, as part of the
               computer game design cycle, can be sufficiently robust to
               succeed in predicting fixation behavior of players.",
  pages =      "43--50",
  month =      aug,
  booktitle =  "ACM Symposium on Applied Perception in Graphics and
               Visualization 2008",
  editor =     "Sarah Creem-Regehr and Karol Myszkowski",
  isbn =       "978-1-59593-981-4",
  publisher =  "ACM",
  location =   "Los Angeles, California",
  keywords =   "saliency, eye tracking, electronic games, visual attention,
               psychophysics",
  URL =        "http://www.cg.tuwien.ac.at/research/publications/2008/SUNDSTEDT-2008-ASF/",
}