Eye&Head

Abstract

Eye gaze involves the coordination of eye and head movement to acquire gaze targets, but existing approaches to gaze pointing are based on eye-tracking in abstraction from head motion. We propose to leverage the synergetic movement of eye and head, and identify design principles for Eye&Head gaze interaction. We introduce three novel techniques that build on the distinction of head-supported versus eyes-only gaze, to enable dynamic coupling of gaze and pointer, hover interaction, visual exploration around pre-selections, and iterative and fast confirmation of targets. We demonstrate Eye&Head interaction on applications in virtual reality, and evaluate our techniques against baselines in pointing and confirmation studies. Our results show that Eye&Head techniques enable novel gaze behaviours that provide users with more control and flexibility in fast gaze pointing and selection.

Leveling the Playing Field: A Comparative Reevaluation of Unmodified Eye Tracking as an Input and Interaction Modality for VR

“…We see similar results when comparing eye tracking to mouse input and again for head-tracking [18]. There is a prior study [48] that found a higher throughput compared to these prior experiments when using gaze; however, it can be challenging to make comparisons across studies and this work did not have any comparison to common modalities, which we utilize in our study. Unlike what we provide in our work, many prior studies, including these three discussed here [18,39,48] do not measure or report eye tracking calibration statistics in their reports; at best they report the manufacturer's stated eye tracking quality, but even that is rare.…”

“…There is a prior study [48] that found a higher throughput compared to these prior experiments when using gaze; however, it can be challenging to make comparisons across studies and this work did not have any comparison to common modalities, which we utilize in our study. Unlike what we provide in our work, many prior studies, including these three discussed here [18,39,48] do not measure or report eye tracking calibration statistics in their reports; at best they report the manufacturer's stated eye tracking quality, but even that is rare. In cases where the eye tracker performance is poor, but not reported on a participant level, it is impossible to know whether poor interaction efficiency is due in earnest to the experimental manipulation or simply the result of tracking errors.…”

BimodalGaze: Seamlessly Refined Pointing with Gaze and Filtered Gestural Head Movement

“…Here, gaze is typically rendered as eyes-only when gaze shifts are below a threshold of 10-15 • , and coupled with head movement otherwise [Ruhland et al 2015]. Recent work also introduced a distinction of eyes-only versus head-supported gaze for point and dwell input [Sidenmark and Gellersen 2019b]. Other work has build on coordinated eye and head movement for estimation of gaze depth and target disambiguation in 3D interfaces [Mardanbegi et al 2019a,b].…”

Outline Pursuits: Gaze-assisted Selection of Occluded Objects in Virtual Reality

“…It has also been proposed to use gaze for coarse-grained selection followed by head movement for subsequent confirmation [22,36] or refinement of positional input [20]. Other work has proposed techniques that leverage concurrent eye and head movement for interaction and target depth estimation [21,23,35]. The hands-free technique we implemented likewise combines head and eye tracking, however with the head tracked for cone-casting, and eye movement matched against the outline motion presented by candidate targets.…”