Goldilocks Zoning: Evaluating a Gaze-Aware Approach to Task-Agnostic VR Notification Placement

While virtual reality (VR) offers immersive experiences, users need to remain aware of notifications from outside VR. However, inserting notifications into a VR experience can result in distraction or breaks in presence, since existing notification systems in VR use static placement and lack situational awareness. We address this challenge by introducing a novel notification placement technique, Goldilocks Zoning (GZ), which leverages a 360-degree heatmap generated using gaze data to place notifications near salient areas of the environment without obstructing the primary task. To investigate the effectiveness of this technique, we conducted a dual-task experiment comparing GZ to common notification placement techniques. We found that GZ had similar performance to state-of-the-art techniques in a variety of primary task scenarios. Our study reveals that no single technique is universally optimal in dynamic settings, underscoring the potential for adaptive approaches to notification management. As a step in this direction, we explored the potential to use machine learning to predict the task based on the gaze heatmap.