Improving Visual Attention Guiding by Differentiation between Fine and Coarse Navigation

Attention guiding improves human performance in search tasks in various applications. With the current generation of Head-Mounted-Displays, new designs for addressing new requirements like stereoscopic cues or a restricted field of view are needed. Besides the design of the navigation system itself, research for two-dimensional interfaces shows that a differentiation into coarse and fine navigation could improve performance. Scenarios with information in a 360 degrees area around the user may especially profit from attention guiding techniques adapting to different navigation modes. To analyse potential performance improvements, two common guiding techniques for fine navigation were combined with an arrow for coarse navigation. Within a laboratory study, the effects of the combination of an arrow with the attention funnel and SWAVE techniques on search time and rotation overhead, as well as subjective preference, have been examined. Results show that the combination partially improves the performance of attention guiding techniques when considering objective and subjective parameters. As the findings are not generally applicable, more in-depth research on the combination of different designs for coarse navigation, as well as other factors of interest, like distraction caused by the attention guiding techniques, should be carried out.