Gaze-enhanced User Interface Design

Abstract

The eyes are a rich source of information for gathering context in our everyday lives. Using eye-gaze information as a form of input can enable a computer system to gain more contextual information about the user's task, which in turn can be leveraged to design interfaces which are more intuitive and intelligent. With the increasing accuracy and decreasing cost of eye gaze tracking systems it will soon be practical for able-bodied users to use gaze as a form of input in addition to keyboard and mouse. Our research explores how gaze information can be effectively used as an augmented input in addition to traditional input devices. We present several novel prototypes that explore the use of gaze as an augmented input to perform everyday computing tasks. In particular we explore the use of gaze for pointing and selection, scrolling, application switching and password entry. We present the results of user experiments which compare the gaze-augmented interaction techniques with traditional mechanisms and show that the resulting interaction is either comparable to or an improvement over existing input methods. These results show that it is indeed possible to devise novel interaction techniques that use gaze as a form of input while minimizing false activations and without overloading the visual channel. We also discuss some of the problems and challenges of using gaze information as a form of input and propose solutions which, as discovered over the course of the research, can be used to mitigate these issues.