Analyzing intrinsic motion textures created from naturalistic video captures

This paper presents an initial exploration of the plausibility of incorporating subtle motions as a useful modality for encoding (or augmenting the encoding of) data for information visualization tasks. Psychophysics research indicates that the human visual system is highly responsive to identifying and differentiating even the subtlest motions intrinsic to an object. We examine aspects of this intrinsic motion, whereby an object stays in one place while a texture applied to that object changes in subtle but perceptible ways. We hypothesize that the use of subtle intrinsic motions (as opposed to more obvious extrinsic motion) will avoid the clutter and visual fatigue that often discourages visualization designers from incorporating motion. Using transformed video captures of naturalistic motions gathered from the world, we conduct a preliminary user study that attempts ascertains the minimum amount of motion that is easily perceptible to a viewer. We introduce metrics which allow us to categorize these motions in terms of flicker (local amplitude and frequency), flutter (global amplitude and frequency), and average maximum contrast between a pixel and its immediate neighbors. Using these metrics (and a few others), we identify plausible ranges of motion that might be appropriate for visualization tasks, either on their own or in conjunction with other modalities (such as color or shape), without increasing visual fatigue. Based on an analysis of these initial preliminary results, we propose that the use of what we term “intrinsic motion textures” may be a promising modality appropriate for a range of visualization tasks.