The Effect of Rotational Ego-Motion on the Perception of High Fidelity Animations

This paper investigates how viewers perceive high-fidelity computer graphics while they are experiencing actual motion. The aim is to exploit the cross-modal interference between the human's visual and vestibular system. This will enable only the perceptually important parts of the imagery to be rendered at the highest quality, while the remainder of the scene can be rendered at a significantly lower quality, for substantially less computational cost, without the viewer being aware of this quality difference. A study was conducted with 24 participants using a six degree of freedom single person motion simulator with a panoramic display. As the simulation progressed the subjects were asked to press a button when they identified a drop in the quality of the graphics. The results of this study show that the subjects did indeed fail to perceive the difference between the high and low quality images when they were subjected to motion compared to when there was no motion.