Abstract
Purpose :
Motion cues are known to facilitate depth perception and may also enhance the visibility of architectural features for people with low visual acuity. This study investigated whether forward or lateral observer motion enhances the visibility of architectural features in an indoor space when viewed with reduced acuity.
Methods :
We rendered scenes of a church sanctuary and a building atrium from 3D models with photometric accuracy using Radiance software. Images were filtered to simulate moderate acuity reduction equivalent to logMAR 0.75 (20/112) and severe acuity reduction 1.55 (20/709). We used the filtered images to construct videos simulating forward and lateral motion of 15 ft, lasting 3.3 seconds. There was also a static viewing control condition.
32 normally sighted young adults were split into two groups of 16 subjects defined by the two levels of simulated acuity reduction. They used a computer mouse to trace the bounding contours of doors or obstacles that were visible to them in the filtered scenes, either after seeing the motion video or with a static view. Ground-truth was determined by two of the experimenters who traced the contours of doors and obstacles in unfiltered versions of the scenes.
Each subject’s tracing was compared to the ground-truth to generate a visibility score on a scale from 0 (contour not seen) to 1.0 (contour labeled accurately). We compared the tracing accuracy for the motion conditions to the static viewing condition.
Results :
We found that the tracing was more accurate with lateral motion (mean score 0.74) than static viewing (mean score 0.67) for near objects (0 to 25 ft) in the 3D scene (after normalizing the scores, t(46) = -2.9597, p = .004), but the forward motion did not have the same effect (mean score 0.68). Motion enhanced visibility only in the severe reduced acuity group (logMAR 1.55), but not the moderate condition (F(2,138) = 3.88, p = 0.0299).
Conclusions :
We found that motion enhances the visibility of architectural features close to the observer. Lateral motion improved visibility significantly, whereas the forward motion did not. There was also an interaction between motion’s effect on visibility and acuity level, where motion only made a difference in the severe acuity reduction condition.
This abstract was presented at the 2019 ARVO Annual Meeting, held in Vancouver, Canada, April 28 - May 2, 2019.