Augmented Concentration: Concentration Improvement by Visual Noise Reduction with a Video See-Through HMD
PubDate: August 2019
Teams: Nara Institute of Science and Technology
Writers: Masaki Koshi; Nobuchika Sakata; Kiyoshi Kiyokawa
Abstract
We propose a concentration improvement technique by using a video see-through head mounted display (HMD). Our technique reduces the visual noise or disturbing visual stimulus, such as moving objects near the central visual field, by lowering its visual saliency in real-time. Earphones and noise cancelling headphones are often used to shutdown auditory noise from surroundings when we need to concentrate on the job. Several studies have proven the effectiveness of such noise reduction on improving the concentration and learning efficiencies. We apply this analogy to the visual noise and propose a visual noise reduction HMD to improve concentration. In this article, we report on two preliminary user studies we conducted to investigate the effectiveness of our method. In the prototype system, we manually specify a part of the visual field as the working area and apply grayscale and blur filters outside it in real-time. We compared two conditions “no effect” and “strong blur” (for Exp 1) or “weak blur” (for Exp 2), using a simple math task. Our preliminary results show that visual noise reduction improves the task completion time by 10% for Exp 1 and 7.9% for Exp 2 on average.
