What your design looks like to peripheral vision

Abstract

At any given instant, much of a display appears in a user's periphral vision. Based on the information available in a glance, the user moves their eyes, scanning the display for items of interest, and piecing together a coherent view of the display. Much of this processing happens unconsciously. Understanding the information available in the periphery can help design better information visualizations and user interfaces, by enabling designers to make displays that effectively guide eye movements and make important information available in a glance. However, it is difficult to attend to our peripheral vision to gain insights about the information available there. In this paper, we discuss a means of visualizing the information available in peripheral vision, given an image of a display and the current fixation. We show results of our model on several information visualizations.