Attentive Saliency and Photorealism in Immersive Virtual Environments

Virtual Reality is widely used in behavioral studies, as it allows to simulate realistic experiences in environments completely controlled by the study designers. In particular, studies on visual saliency and attention can leverage immersive graphics rendered on head-mounted displays to create custom environments and head, body, and gaze tracking systems to evaluate the participant’s behavior. However, some aspects of the design of VR applications for attentive saliency study, especially in relation to rendering style, are poorly investigated in the literature. In our work, we created virtual environments for a study on junk food craving, and performed an experiment to assess how much the saliency of visual items is influenced by photorealism and correlated with the presence measured with questionnaires. Furthermore, we investigated the feasibility of replacing the eye-tracking-based saliency measure with approximated measurements based on head tracking.