Interacting with eye movements in virtual environments

Abstract

Eye movement-based interaction offers the potential of easy, natural, and fast ways of interacting in virtual environments. However, there is little empirical evidence about the advantages or disadvantages of this approach. We developed a new interaction technique for eye movement interaction in a virtual environment and compared it to more conventional 3-D pointing. We conducted an experiment to compare performance of the two interaction types and to assess their impacts on spatial memory of subjects and to explore subjects' satisfaction with the two types of interactions. We found that the eye movementbased interaction was faster than pointing, especially for distant objects. However, subjects' ability to recall spatial information was weaker in the eye condition than the pointing one. Subjects reported equal satisfaction with both types of interactions, despite the technology limitations of current eye tracking equipment.

An Empirical Investigation of Gaze Selection in Mid-Air Gestural 3D Manipulation

“…The results from Task 1 are in line with Tanriverdi and Jacob [8]. Even though their setup was VR-based, it seems that Gaze also outperform other 3D selection techniques in monoscopic displays.…”

“…Tanriverdi and Jacob compared selection time and the users' ability to recall spatial information in a VR between two techniques: the gaze position and pointing with a magnetic tracker [8]. They found that the gaze technique was significantly faster, but led to more difficulties in recalling the locations of items they had interacted with.…”

“…On the other hand, Cournia et al compared gaze and hand pointing in VR and found hand pointing to perform better [9]. Following Cournia et al's recommendation, we implemented our 2D cursor using raycasting, as it seemed to outperform arm extension techniques (such as the one used by Tanriverdi and Jacob [8]). These works, however, investigate 3D interaction in an immersive VR environment, whereas we use a monoscopic display.…”

“…Even though gaze pointing for computing input has been investigated since the 80's [6], studies on gaze pointing for 3DUI started with work by Koons et al, who built a multimodal interface integrating speech, gaze and hand gestures [7]. Early work was also conducted by Tanriverdi and Jacob, who found it to be faster than an arm-extension technique with a 6DOF magnetic tracker in a VR environment [8]. Cournia et al found conflicting results that suggest gaze is slower than a hand-based Raycasting technique with a wand [9].…”

Target Selection in Augmented Reality Worlds

“…Potentially new ways of implementing easy, fast and natural ways of object selection for walkable or wearable AR applications include eye movement analysis and even brain computer interface (BCI) techniques. Some work in eye-movement analysis for non-cursor based selection of objects has already been described for VE's [12] -it is of interest to discover whether such techniques map easily to AR systems. The performance of BCI systems remains, at present, very limited -though it is intriguing to note that a good proportion of BCI work has been aimed at cursor manipulation (see [13] for instance).…”