Creating Personalized Digital Human Models Of Perception For Visual Analytics Mike Bennett 1 and Aaron Quigley 2 1 SCIEN, Department Of Psychology, Stanford University mikemb@stanford.edu 2 SACHI, School Of Computer Science North Haugh, University of St Andrews, Scotland aquigley@cs.st-andrews.ac.uk Abstract. Our bodies shape our experience of the world, and our bod- ies influence what we design. How important are the physical differences between people? Can we model the physiological differences and use the models to adapt and personalize designs, user interfaces and artifacts? Within many disciplines Digital Human Models and Standard Observer Models are widely used and have proven to be very useful for model- ing users and simulating humans. In this paper, we create personalized digital human models of perception (Individual Observer Models), par- ticularly focused on how humans see. Individual Observer Models cap- ture how our bodies shape our perceptions. Individual Observer Models are useful for adapting and personalizing user interfaces and artifacts to suit individual users’ bodies and perceptions. We introduce and demon- strate an Individual Observer Model of human eyesight, which we use to simulate 3600 biologically valid human eyes. An evaluation of the sim- ulated eyes finds that they see eye charts the same as humans. Also demonstrated is the Individual Observer Model successfully making pre- dictions about how easy or hard it is to see visual information and visual designs. The ability to predict and adapt visual information to maximize how effective it is is an important problem in visual design and analytics. Keywords: virtual humans, physiology modeling, computational user model, individual differences, human vision, digital human model 1 Introduction Our bodies shape our experience of the world, and our bodies influence what we design. For example clothes are not designed for people with three arms because designers implicitly model standard human physiology. Yet, human bodies differ, some people are born with small bodies, others with bodies that see colors dif- ferently (colorblindness). How important are these physical differences between people? Can we model the physiological differences and use the models to adapt and personalize designs, user interfaces and artifacts? Many domains, such as medicine, health, sports science, and car safety are creating digital human models [7]. These digital human models are very useful for identifying and evaluating the strengths and weakness in prototype artifacts and novel tools. Initially, the majority of the digital human models were pri- marily concerned with modeling humans’ physical bodies and biomechanics [3].