Collaborators: [Michael
Dorr]
Goal: To make
gaze guidance on a PC monitor smoother (more comfortable).
When one
writes a text on your PC monitor, there are many visual distractions occurring,
such as suddenly appearing advertisement in your browser, email notifications
and pop-up dialogs informing you about on-going processes. Many of these
distractions will capture your gaze – even if it is for a fraction of a second
only. But finding back to the cursor position in your text editor is not always
straight forward – it often results in a short visual search, which one is
hardly aware of. It would be better if gaze was recaptured after such a
distraction. Although the editor cursor is blinking, in many situations this
‘blinking’ is not enough, because once you leave the editor window, your gaze
is too peripheral to sense the blinking cursor. In this project, we attempt to
make the cursor size gaze-contingent, that is, the farther away your gaze moves
away your cursor – the more eccentric it is -, the larger the cursor becomes
and that should therefore facilitate your way back to the position of text
entry. We call it the gaze-recapturing editor cursor (GREC). The GREC is not
only beneficial when the writer was distracted by notifications, but also for
instance when switching between windows and copying and pasting text.
Method: The goal was to engage the subject
into a task which required frequent scrolling within the windows and switching
between windows in order to exploit the use of the gaze-contingent cursor as
much as possible, given the limited duration of a typical evaluation. Subjects
were asked to create hyperlinks between specific words in a text placed in a
word document and specific web addresses. At the end of the test, subjects were
asked to evaluate the use of the gaze-contingent cursor. The specific
instructions were as follows (see file task
instructions).
Results: We are in the process of testing.
Discussion: The broad success of the
gaze-recapturing editor cursor ultimately depends on the success of providing a
PC monitor with a cheap, unobtrusive eye-tracker. The technology exists in
principal, e.g. [link].
Such eye-trackers do not necessarily need to be very accurate. We think an
accuracy of 1 degree is sufficient for a GREC.
The project is a spin-off from our research on a
gaze-guidance system:
[link to project website] the website of the 5-lab European collaboration
[pdf
manuscript] manuscript
full of ideas for human-computer interaction
[talk] slides about
this issue