Dynamic Visual Dominance in Stereoscopic Foveation

Abstract

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 fovea and periphery, indicating how foveation techniques could benefit from it.