Filtering visual information for reducing visual cognitive load

With the increasing presence and role that computers play in our daily lives, the quantity of visual information received from digital devices is expanding. The mobility and portability requirements of our modern lifestyles further overload our visual cognition with distractions from the real world. Consequently, our cognition is constantly occupied with processing insignificant visual information. The excessive presence of visual information made concentrating on essentials more challenging than ever. To increase cognitive performance on user-relevant tasks, we propose an approach to filter unrelated visual information. Our approach utilizes Image Processing to blur all insignificant regions of the user's field of view, leaving only relevant user-defined visual regions. To verify our approach, we have developed a head mounted display based prototype and carried out a short user study followed by a questionnaire and an interview. The user-study's results indicated a number of insights, most importantly our approach's preliminary success in increasing users' concentration with presence of other distractions. Finally, we provided our future direction to further expand our research.