Your Eyes on Speed: Using Pupil Dilation to Adaptively Select Speed-Reading Parameters in Virtual Reality

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@inproceedings{grootjen2024your,
title = {Your Eyes on Speed: Using Pupil Dilation to Adaptively Select Speed-Reading Parameters in Virtual Reality},
author = {Jesse W Grootjen and Phillipp Thallhammer and Thomas Kosch},
url = {https://thomaskosch.com/wp-content/papercite-data/pdf/grootjen2024your.pdf},
doi = {10.1145/3676531},
year = {2024},
month = {sept}
series = {MobileHCI '24},
booktitle = {{Proceedings of the 26th International Conference on Human-Computer Interaction with Mobile Devices and Services}},
publisher = {ACM},
address = {New York, NY, USA}
}

Abstract

Rapid Serial Visual Presentation (RSVP) improves the reading speed for optimizing the user's information processing capabilities on Virtual Reality (VR) devices. Yet, the user's RSVP reading performance changes over time while the reading speed remains static. In this paper, we evaluate pupil dilation as a physiological metric to assess the mental workload of readers in real-time. We assess mental workload under different background lighting and RSVP presentation speeds to estimate the optimal color that discriminates the pupil diameter varying RSVP presentation speeds. We discovered that a gray background provides the best contrast for reading at various presentation speeds. Then, we conducted a second study to evaluate the classification accuracy of mental workload for different presentation speeds. We find that pupil dilation relates to mental workload when reading with RSVP. We discuss how pupil dilation can be used to adapt the RSVP speed in future VR applications to optimize information intake.