Gaze-contingent multi-modality displays of multi-layered geographical maps

Abstract

In this work a system for construction of gaze-contingent multi-modality displays of multi-layered geographical maps is proposed. Such displays can be very useful for designing various map viewing and reading experiments and hopefully for computation of the visual span in map processing for different tasks, e.g. target detection or navigation. In gaze-contingent displays a window centred around the observer's fixation point is modified while the observer moves their eyes around the display. In the proposed technique this window, in the central part of vision, is taken from one of the input images, which in this case contains information from a number of map layers, while the rest of the display, in peripheral vision, contains information from another set of possibly different map layers. Thus different map information can be channelled to the central and the peripheral vision. The human visual system fuses the information from these two sets of layers into a single percept. © Springer-Verlag Berlin Heidelberg 2003.