Evaluation of detection and discrimination ability of peripheral vision on notification information based on large displays

•We propose an array of glyphs as a notification system using peripheral vision.•The system behaviors were controlled by size, rhythm, frequency, and phase shift.•The size of the glyph arrays affects detectability more than location or shape.•Phase shift is better than frequency as a coding dimension for discriminability.•The results are worst-case lower bounds for real applications.

Large displays enable users to perform several tasks simultaneously. Under such circumstances, notification information provided through the concept of ambient displays plays a vital role in assisting users to switch among tasks. This paper presents the experimental results of a notification system design in the peripheral region of large displays. The aim is to provide guidance for notification information design by investigating detection and discrimination performance of human observers when visual notification information is presented away from the foveal region and viewed using peripheral vision. The proposed notification system was designed using an array of glyphs. Each glyph is a small gray square with a fixed size of 60 × 60 pixels. By changing the gray levels of adjacent glyphs dynamically, a glyph array presents a particular dynamic pattern. The experiments involved testing factors that comprised the visual angle, size and shape of glyph arrays, frequency of temporal modulation, phase shift of each pattern, and number of stimuli. The results show that glyph arrays are detected accurately if they are larger, even at wide viewing angles, and that the number of glyphs in a glyph array affects the performance more than the shapes of glyph arrays do. Furthermore, the discrimination performance is higher when both the frequency and phase are manipulated simultaneously (multidimensional design), compared with the case when each of these dimensions is varied separately (single-dimensional design). When the number of stimuli is set at 8, for example, users can maintain an accuracy rate of 70% for the multidimensional design, whereas the accuracy rate is only approximately 60% for the single-dimensional design.