Utilizing Gaze-Contingent Rendering to Maintain Visual Attention in Educational VR

In educational Virtual Reality (VR) environments, objects irrelevant to learning can lead to students' inattention, which adversely affects learning. However, removing these objects from virtual scenes is not feasible, as they are crucial for creating a realistic and immersive experience. Balancing the need to maintain students' attention while preserving the integrity of scenarios is a challenging task. In this paper, we introduce a gaze-contingent rendering (GCR) technique to address such an issue, which is independent of specific elements or configurations in virtual scenes and adaptable across various contexts. Specifically, we utilize gaze-aware rendering adjustments to adaptively reduce the visibility of objects irrelevant to learning while highlighting relevant ones. We develop three GCR strategies (i.e., blur, pixelation, and underexposure) and investigate how these strategies affect students' visual attention, academic achievement, and perceptions of the learning activity across different scenarios. Our findings indicate that the proposed rendering strategies effectively achieve the goals of sustaining visual attention and improving academic achievement without significantly impacting immersion or engagement. As an initial exploration of GCR for maintaining attention within educational VR, this study may inspire new directions in future research on GCR and visual attention maintenance in immersive VR.