Effects of Field of View on Dynamic Out-of-View Target Search in Virtual Reality

We present a study of the effects of field of view (FOV), target movement, and number of targets on visual search performance in virtual reality. We compared visual search tasks in two FOVs ( 65°, 32.5°) under two target movement speeds (static, dynamic) while varying the visible target count, with targets potentially out of the user’s view. We examined the expected linear relationship between search time and number of items, to explore how moving and/or out-of-view targets affected this relationship. Overall, search performance increased with a wide FOV, but decreased when targets were moving and with more visible targets. FOV more strongly influenced search performance than target movement. Neither FOV nor target movement meaningfully altered the linear relationship between visual search time and number of items. Participants also rated perceived workload for each condition; FOV and target movement both negatively affected the perceived workload, with target movement being a more significant factor.