Region of interest displays: addressing a perceptual problem?

When viewing multimedia presentations, a user can only be attending to a relatively small part of the video display at any one point in time. Accordingly, by shifting allocation of bandwidth from peripheral regions of the screen to regions-of-interest (RoI), which are measured or highly probable positions of user attention, attentive displays can be produced. This paper reports a perceptual comparison between two region of interest displays (RoIDs) approaches, manipulating two sources of data: eye-gaze data (extracted using eye tracking technology) and video-dependent data (determined from the physical characteristics of the video data). Results show that over a broad range of different subject matter, no net variation is measured in user level of information assimilation and understanding as a result of a change in the type of presentation display. Interestingly, use of frame rates less than 15 frames per second, for any video adaptation technique, caused a reduction in user perceived quality, suggesting that users are aware of video quality reduction. Results also emphasize that user level of enjoyment is affected by video type, yet is not affected by the quality of video adaptation.