We introduce to VR a novel imperceptible gaze guidance technique from a recent discovery that human gaze can be attracted to a cue that contrasts from the background in its perceptually non-distinctive ocularity, defined as the relative difference between inputs to the two eyes. This cue pops out in the saliency map in the primary visual cortex without being overtly visible. We tested this method in an odd-one-out visual search task using eye tracking with 15 participants in VR. When the target was rendered as an ocularity singleton, participants' gaze was drawn to the target faster. Conversely, when a background object served as the ocularity singleton, it distracted gaze from the target. Since ocularity is nearly imperceptible, our method maintains user immersion while guiding attention without noticeable scene alterations and can render object's depth in 3D scenes, creating new possibilities for immersive user experience across diverse VR applications.

翻译：我们向虚拟现实引入了一种新颖的不可察觉的注视引导技术，该技术源于一项近期发现：人类注视可以被吸引至一个在感知上不显著的眼间差异上与背景形成对比的线索，眼间差异定义为输入到双眼的相对差异。该线索会在初级视觉皮层的显著图中凸显出来，而不会被明显地察觉到。我们在虚拟现实中，使用眼动追踪技术，让15名参与者完成一项"找不同"视觉搜索任务，以测试此方法。当目标被渲染为眼间差异单例时，参与者的注视被更快地吸引到目标上。相反，当一个背景物体作为眼间差异单例时，它会将注视从目标上分散开。由于眼间差异几乎不可察觉，我们的方法在引导注意力的同时保持了用户的沉浸感，且无需对场景进行明显改动，并能在3D场景中渲染物体的深度，从而为跨多种VR应用的沉浸式用户体验创造了新的可能性。