Saccade & Foveated Vision Simulator

Gaze Mode: Mouse Follow
Suppression: Off

1. Interaction Mode

🖱️ Hover Mode
Follows Cursor
🎯 Click Mode
Jump to Click

2. Guided Scenarios

3. Basic Settings

🛠️ Advanced Biophysics Settings ▼
Move your mouse to slide your central gaze over the image!
⚡ DEMO MODE ACTIVE - Click to Control

Mode: Mouse Hover (Continuous Foveation)

Your sharp central field of view (fovea) smoothly tracks your mouse. Notice how text in your periphery becomes unreadable and loses color (desaturates), mimicking how colorblind rod cells process the edge of human vision.

Fovea (Central Sharp Vision)
Periphery (Blurred & Colorblind Rods)
Optic Disk (Blind Spot)

Overview

Human vision is highly optimized and largely an illusion. Only a tiny central patch spanning approximately 1 to 2 degrees of our complete visual field—known as the fovea centralis—is packed with cone cells capable of extracting high-resolution, full-color detail. The vast remaining peripheral visual field is dominated by rod cells, which have poor resolution and are entirely colorblind, but are highly responsive to motion.

To reconstruct a seamless, high-definition model of reality, our brains utilize saccades: rapid, ballistic movements of the eyes to re-orient the fovea toward objects of interest. These ocular sweeps are among the fastest movements produced by the human body, with peak velocities exceeding 700° per second. This simulator demonstrates this physiological pipeline, mapping human eye movement mechanics into a dynamic, browser-based environment.

How to Use

Choose between two interaction modes to explore visual processing:

  • Hover Mode (Default): Move your mouse across the text or image. The sharp fovea spotlight glides continuously with your cursor using biological smooth pursuit lag. This demonstrates why you cannot read peripheral text without looking directly at it, and reveals the desaturated colorblindness of your peripheral rod cells.
  • Click Mode (Saccade Jump): Click anywhere on the image. Your eye will execute a biological jump (saccade) from your current position to the clicked target. A trajectory arrow shows the path, while saccadic suppression briefly darkens the view mid-flight.
  • Slow-Motion Jumps: Toggle slow-motion jumps to slow flight speed by 80%, allowing you to examine how acceleration and sensory gating function step-by-step.

Technical Details

This simulator uses offscreen canvas instances to separate image processing loops and prevent structural bottlenecks during real-time rendering:

  • Double-Buffered Grayscale Blurring: The offscreen canvas system generates blurred, color-desaturated frames to match the colorblind profile of peripheral rod cells, optimizing runtime painting costs.
  • Strict Clock Alignment: Ocular transition kinematics are tied directly to performance.now(). This guarantees mathematical continuity across rapid clicks, preventing browser coordinate rendering issues.
  • Strategic Exclusion of Web Audio synthesis: Human saccades and visual suppression are silent neurological events. Adding synthetic auditory feedback would misrepresent the sensory gating process. Audio synthesis is intentionally excluded to preserve visual clarity.
  • Automated Sandboxed Demo Engine: Includes a background inactivity scanner. If no interaction is made for 12 seconds, parameters are preserved in an isolated storage block, and the engine triggers guided saccades along reading pathways. Interacting with the canvas immediately exits and restores your original setup.

Future Directions

  • Eye Tracker API Integration: Future iterations could use web-camera eye-tracking software to map the fovea to a user's physical eye movements.
  • Visual Pathologies: Additional preset filters simulating macular degeneration (central vision loss) and glaucoma (tunnel vision).

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