Daniel Jiménez-Navarro

In human vision, the inputs perceived by each eye do not contribute equally to the final percept. Instead, visual dominance influences how these inputs are fused, giving more weight to one eye view over the other. While eye dominance has been traditionally treated as a static, eye-fixed property, recent evidence suggests that dominance can vary with viewing conditions. In this work, we systematically characterize dynamic visual dominance across the visual field, with a particular focus on peripheral vision, where perceptual asymmetries are most relevant for stereoscopic rendering. Through two complementary psychophysical experiments, we first show that tolerance to eye-asymmetric blur at the fovea under binocular viewing depends on gaze direction, confirming that eye dominance is not spatially invariant. We then show that peripheral dominance is primarily governed by retinal eccentricity, with consistent naso-temporal asymmetries and dominance reversals around the blind spots. We leverage our insights in a dominance-contingent rendering application, where additional blur is selectively applied to the perceptually non-dominant eye regions under binocular viewing. Compared to static dominance approaches, our method enables stronger localized quality reductions, illustrating the practical relevance of dynamic peripheral dominance for stereoscopic foveated rendering. Thus, our goal through this work is to show how visual dominance behaves dynamically in both the fovea and the periphery, indicating how foveation techniques could benefit from it.

Our ability to perceive and navigate the spatial world is a cornerstone of human experience, relying on the integration of visual and auditory cues to form a coherent sense of depth and distance. In stereoscopic 3D vision, depth perception requires fixation of both eyes on a target object, which is achieved through vergence movements, with convergence for near objects and divergence for distant ones. In contrast, auditory cues provide complementary depth information through variations in loudness, interaural differences (IAD), and the frequency spectrum. We investigate the interaction between visual and auditory cues and examine how contradictory auditory information can overdrive visual depth perception in virtual reality (VR). When a new visual target appears, we introduce a spatial discrepancy between the visual and auditory cues: the visual target is shifted closer to the previously fixated object, while the corresponding sound localization is displaced in the opposite direction. By integrating these conflicting cues through multimodal processing, the resulting percept is biased toward the intended depth location. This audiovisual fusion counteracts depth compression, thus reducing the required vergence magnitude and enabling faster gaze retargeting. Such audio-driven depth enhancement may further help mitigate the vergence-accommodation conflict (VAC) in scenarios where physical depth must be compressed. In a series of psychophysical studies, we first assess the efficiency of depth overdriving for various VR-relevant combinations of initial fixations and shifted target locations, considering different scenarios of audio displacements and their loudness and frequency parameters. Next, we quantify the resulting speedup in gaze retargeting for target shifts that can be successfully overdriven by sound manipulations. Finally, we apply our method in a naturalistic VR scenario where user interface interactions with the scene show an extended perceptual depth.

Human senses and perception are our mechanisms to explore the external world. In this context, visual saccades –rapid and coordinated eye movements– serve as a primary tool for awareness of our surroundings. Typically, our perception is not limited to visual stimuli alone but is enriched by cross-modal interactions, such as the combination of sight and hearing. In this work, we investigate the temporal and spatial relationship of these interactions, focusing on how auditory cues that precede visual stimuli influence saccadic latency –the time that it takes for the eyes to react and start moving towards a visual target. Our research, conducted within a virtual reality environment, reveals that auditory cues preceding visual information can significantly accelerate saccadic responses, but this effect plateaus beyond certain temporal thresholds. Additionally, while the spatial positioning of visual stimuli influences the speed of these eye movements, as reported in previous research, we find that the location of auditory cues with respect to their corresponding visual stimulus does not have a comparable effect. To validate our findings, we implement two practical applications: first, a basketball training task set in a more realistic environment with complex audiovisual signals, and second, an interactive farm game that explores previously untested values of our key factors. Lastly, we discuss various potential applications where our model could be beneficial.