Augmented film narrative by use of non-photorealistic rendering

Our research is about the effects of non-photorealistic rendering in the perception of stereoscopic cinema. We conducted a study with 27 participants, using eye-tracker to evaluate ocular behavior during the free viewing of a stereoscopic film. We obtained ocular fixation data that were correlated with visual entropy. Gaze data leads us to believe that facing a highly abstract non-photorealistic scene the gaze seems to react under the effect of a perceptive anxiety. This ocular response seems to spontaneously assign greater sensorimotor resources to the analysis of the character's behavior, transforming his face into the main key to analyse the information and sense of the global scene. This behavior appears to us as an adaptive response to a visual environment endowed with abstraction and cognitive uncertainty. Our results could be useful for conceiving new non-photorealistic rendering tools for 3D films and cinematic virtual reality.