MobileHCI 2024: Visual Noise Cancellation: Exploring Visual Discomfort and Opportunities for Vision Augmentations

HCI Deep Dives

Junlei Hong, Tobias Langlotz, Jonathan Sutton, and Holger Regenbrecht. 2024. Visual Noise Cancellation: Exploring Visual Discomfort and Opportunities for Vision Augmentations. ACM Trans. Comput.-Hum. Interact. 31, 2, Article 22 (April 2024), 26 pages. https://doi.org/10.1145/3634699

Acoustic noise control or cancellation (ANC) is a commonplace component of modern audio headphones. ANC aims to actively mitigate disturbing environmental noise for a quieter and improved listening experience. ANC is digitally controlling frequency and amplitude characteristics of sound. Much less explored is visual noise and active visual noise control, which we address here. We first explore visual noise and scenarios in which visual noise arises based on findings from four workshops we conducted. We then introduce the concept of visual noise cancellation (VNC) and how it can be used to reduce identified effects of visual noise. In addition, we developed head-worn demonstration prototypes to practically explore the concept of active VNC with selected scenarios in a user study. Finally, we discuss the application of VNC, including vision augmentations that moderate the user’s view of the environment to address perceptual needs and to provide augmented reality content.

https://dl.acm.org/doi/10.1145/3634699