Depth-of-field blur effects for first-person navigation in virtual environments

This paper studies the use of visual blur effects, i.e., blurring of parts of the image fed back to the user, for First-Person-Navigations in Virtual Environments (VE). First, we introduce a model of dynamic visual blur for VE which is based on two types of blur effect: (1) a Depth-of-Field blur (DoF blur) which simulates the blurring of objects located in front or back of the focus point of the eyes, and (2) a peripheral blur which simulates the blurring of objects located at the periphery of the field of vision. We introduce two new techniques to improve real-time DoF: (1) a paradigm to compute automatically the focal distance, and (2) a temporal filtering that simulates the accommodation phenomenon. Second, we describe the results of a pilot experiment conducted to study the influence of blur effects on the performance and preference of video gamers during multiplayer sessions. Interestingly, it seems that visual blur effects did not degrade performance of gamers and they were preferred and selected by nearly half of the participants to improve fun and game-play. Taken together, our results suggest that the use of visual blur effects could thus be suitable in videogames and in other virtual environments.