Combining Direct and Indirect Touch Input for Interactive Workspaces using Gaze Input

Abstract

Interactive workspaces combine horizontal and vertical touch surfaces into a single digital workspace. During an exploration of these systems, it was shown that direct interaction on the vertical surface is cumbersome and more inaccurate than on the horizontal one. To overcome these problems, indirect touch systems turn the horizontal touch surface into an input devices that allows manipulation of objects on the vertical display. If the horizontal touch surface also acts as a display, however, it becomes necessary to distinguish which screen is currently in use by providing a switching mode. We investigate the use of gaze tracking to perform these mode switches. In three user studies we compare absolute and relative gaze augmented selection techniques with the traditional direct-touch approach. Our results show that our relative gaze augmented selection technique outperforms the other techniques for simple tapping tasks alternating between horizontal and vertical surfaces, and for dragging on the vertical surface. However, when tasks involve dragging across surfaces, the findings are more complex. We provide a detailed description of the proposed interaction techniques, a statistical analysis of these interaction techniques, and how they can be applied to systems that involve a combination of multiple horizontal and vertical touch surfaces.

Eye Gaze Controlled Projected Display in Automotive and Military Aviation Environments

“…Pfeuffer and Voelker explored fusing touchscreen interaction with gaze controlled system by using eye gaze for object selection and touch interaction for object manipulation. Pfeuffer [22] explored desktop computing tasks like image searching and map navigation while Voelker [23] investigated multi-screen display, which is more advanced in terms of coordinate mapping between horizontal and vertical displays compared to Dostal's [11] system. However, our proposed work uses eye gaze for not only object selection but also for cursor movement.…”

Improving Eye Gaze Controlled Car Dashboard using Simulated Annealing

“…Pfeuffer and Voelker explored fusing touchscreen interaction with gaze controlled system by using eye gaze for object selection and touch interaction for object manipulation. Pfeuffer [2016] explored desktop computing tasks like image searching and map navigation while Voelker [2015] investigated multi-screen display, which is more advanced in terms of coordinate mapping between horizontal and vertical displays compared to Dostal's [2013] system. However, our proposed work uses eye gaze for not only object selection but also for cursor movement.…”

Novel Indirect Touch Input Techniques Applied to Finger-Forming 3D Models

“…Based on this, Voelker et al [30] compared different interaction techniques to enable a comfortable tracking state for indirect touch input in such setups and found lift-andtap to be the most promising. In the context of interactive workspace ergonomics (e.g., [31]), both Voelker et al [29] and Pfeuffer et al [24] introduced gaze-based mode switching between direct and indirect touch input. Further, Gilliot et al [8] explored the influence of input surface form factors on indirect target selection tasks with an absolute mapping and found that decreasing the input surface size improves target selection accuracy and that diverging aspect ratios between input and display areas decreases it.…”