Gaze modulated disambiguation technique for gesture control in 3D virtual objects selection

© 2017 IEEE. Inputs with multimodal information provide more natural ways to interact with virtual 3D environment. An emerging technique that integrates gaze modulated pointing with mid-air gesture control enables fast target acquisition and rich control expressions. The performance of this technique relies on the eye tracking accuracy which is not comparable with the traditional pointing techniques (e.g., mouse) yet. This will cause troubles when fine grainy interactions are required, such as selecting in a dense virtual scene where proximity and occlusion are prone to occur. This paper proposes a coarse-to-fine solution to compensate the degradation introduced by eye tracking inaccuracy using a gaze cone to detect ambiguity and then a gaze probe for decluttering. It is tested in a comparative experiment which involves 12 participants with 3240 runs. The results show that the proposed technique enhanced the selection accuracy and user experience but it is still with a potential to be improved in efficiency. This study contributes to providing a robust multimodal interface design supported by both eye tracking and mid-air gesture control

Multimodal interactions in virtual environments using eye tracking and gesture control.

Multimodal interactions provide users with more natural ways to interact with virtual environments than using traditional input methods. An emerging approach is gaze modulated pointing, which enables users to perform virtual content selection and manipulation conveniently through the use of a combination of gaze and other hand control techniques/pointing devices, in this thesis, mid-air gestures. To establish a synergy between the two modalities and evaluate the affordance of this novel multimodal interaction technique, it is important to understand their behavioural patterns and relationship, as well as any possible perceptual conflicts and interactive ambiguities. More specifically, evidence shows that eye movements lead hand movements but the question remains that whether the leading relationship is similar when interacting using a pointing device. Moreover, as gaze modulated pointing uses different sensors to track and detect user behaviours, its performance relies on users perception on the exact spatial mapping between the virtual space and the physical space. It raises an underexplored issue that whether gaze can introduce misalignment of the spatial mapping and lead to users misperception and interactive errors. Furthermore, the accuracy of eye tracking and mid-air gesture control are not comparable with the traditional pointing techniques (e.g., mouse) yet. This may cause pointing ambiguity when fine grainy interactions are required, such as selecting in a dense virtual scene where proximity and occlusion are prone to occur. This thesis addresses these concerns through experimental studies and theoretical analysis that involve paradigm design, development of interactive prototypes, and user study for verification of assumptions, comparisons and evaluations. Substantial data sets were obtained and analysed from each experiment. The results conform to and extend previous empirical findings that gaze leads pointing devices movements in most cases both spatially and temporally. It is testified that gaze does introduce spatial misperception and three methods (Scaling, Magnet and Dual-gaze) were proposed and proved to be able to reduce the impact caused by this perceptual conflict where Magnet and Dual-gaze can deliver better performance than Scaling. In addition, a coarse-to-fine solution is proposed and evaluated to compensate the degradation introduced by eye tracking inaccuracy, which uses a gaze cone to detect ambiguity followed by a gaze probe for decluttering. The results show that this solution can enhance the interaction accuracy but requires a compromise on efficiency. These findings can be used to inform a more robust multimodal inter- face design for interactions within virtual environments that are supported by both eye tracking and mid-air gesture control. This work also opens up a technical pathway for the design of future multimodal interaction techniques, which starts from a derivation from natural correlated behavioural patterns, and then considers whether the design of the interaction technique can maintain perceptual constancy and whether any ambiguity among the integrated modalities will be introduced

GazeSwitch : Automatic Eye-Head Mode Switching for Optimised Hands-Free Pointing

This paper contributes GazeSwitch, an ML-based technique that optimises the real-time switching between eye and head modes for fast and precise hands-free pointing. GazeSwitch reduces false positives from natural head movements and efficiently detects head gestures for input, resulting in an effective hands-free and adaptive technique for interaction. We conducted two user studies to evaluate its performance and user experience. Comparative analyses with baseline switching techniques, Eye+Head Pinpointing (manual) and BimodalGaze (threshold-based) revealed several trade-offs. We found that GazeSwitch provides a natural and effortless experience but trades off control and stability compared to manual mode switching, and requires less head movement compared to BimodalGaze. This work demonstrates the effectiveness of machine learning approach to learn and adapt to patterns in head movement, allowing us to better leverage the synergistic relation between eye and head input modalities for interaction in mixed and extended reality

Eye&Head:Synergetic Eye and Head Movement for Gaze Pointing and Selection

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

Coordinated Eye and Head Movements for Gaze Interaction in 3D Environments

Gaze is attractive for interaction, as we naturally look at objects we are interested in. As a result, gaze has received significant attention within human-computer interaction as an input modality. However, gaze has been limited to only eye movements in situations where head movements are not expected to be used or as head movements in an approximation of gaze when an eye tracker is unavailable. From these observations arise an opportunity and a challenge: we propose to consider gaze as multi-modal in line with psychology and neuroscience research to more accurately represent user movements. The natural coordination of eye and head movements could then enable the development of novel interaction techniques to further the possibilities of gaze as an input modality. However, knowledge of the eye and head coordination in 3D environments and its usage for interaction design is limited. This thesis explores eye and head coordination and their potential for interaction in 3D environments by developing interaction techniques that aim to tackle established gaze-interaction issues. We study fundamental eye, head, and body movements in virtual reality during gaze shifts. From the study results, we design interaction techniques and applications that avoid the Midas touch issue, allow expressive gaze- based interaction, and handle eye tracking accuracy issues. We ground the evaluation of our interaction techniques through empirical studies. From the techniques and study results, we define three design principles for coordinated eye and head interaction from these works that distinguish between eye- only and head-supported gaze shifts, eye-head alignment as input, and distinguishing head movements for gestures and head movements that naturally occur to support gaze. We showcase new directions for gaze-based interaction and present a new way to think about gaze by taking a more comprehensive approach to gaze interaction and showing that there is more to gaze than just the eyes

The Future of Humanoid Robots

This book provides state of the art scientific and engineering research findings and developments in the field of humanoid robotics and its applications. It is expected that humanoids will change the way we interact with machines, and will have the ability to blend perfectly into an environment already designed for humans. The book contains chapters that aim to discover the future abilities of humanoid robots by presenting a variety of integrated research in various scientific and engineering fields, such as locomotion, perception, adaptive behavior, human-robot interaction, neuroscience and machine learning. The book is designed to be accessible and practical, with an emphasis on useful information to those working in the fields of robotics, cognitive science, artificial intelligence, computational methods and other fields of science directly or indirectly related to the development and usage of future humanoid robots. The editor of the book has extensive R&D experience, patents, and publications in the area of humanoid robotics, and his experience is reflected in editing the content of the book

Ubiquitous computing and natural interfaces for environmental information

Dissertação apresentada na Faculdade de Ciências e Tecnologia da Universidade Nova de Lisboa para obtenção do Grau de Mestre em Engenharia do Ambiente, perfil Gestão e Sistemas AmbientaisThe next computing revolution‘s objective is to embed every street, building, room and object with computational power. Ubiquitous computing (ubicomp) will allow every object to receive and transmit information, sense its surroundings and act accordingly, be located from anywhere in the world, connect every person. Everyone will have the possibility to access information, despite their age, computer knowledge, literacy or physical impairment. It will impact the world in a profound way, empowering mankind, improving the environment, but will also create new challenges that our society, economy, health and global environment will have to overcome. Negative impacts have to be identified and dealt with in advance. Despite these concerns, environmental studies have been mostly absent from discussions on the new paradigm. This thesis seeks to examine ubiquitous computing, its technological emergence, raise awareness towards future impacts and explore the design of new interfaces and rich interaction modes. Environmental information is approached as an area which may greatly benefit from ubicomp as a way to gather, treat and disseminate it, simultaneously complying with the Aarhus convention. In an educational context, new media are poised to revolutionize the way we perceive, learn and interact with environmental information. cUbiq is presented as a natural interface to access that information

Moving out from the focus:Exploring gaze interaction design in games

Eye trackers have become an aordable and compelling input device for game interaction that is targeting the PC gaming community. The number of games adopting gaze input for in-game interaction has rapidly increased over the years with examples in mainstream game franchises. However, games have focused on integrating gaze input on top of fully functional games, utilising gaze as a pointing device and a tool for eciency; e.g. for the faster selection of game objects the player looks at to improve their performance. We deem this is limiting because the use of gaze is obvious, it does not harvest the full potential and richness of the eyes, and only considers that players look at game elements to interact with them. Accordingly, this thesis investigates new opportunities for gaze in games by exploring gaze concepts that challenge the interaction metaphor "what you look at is what you get" to propose adopting "not looking" gaze interactions that reflect what we can do with our eyes. Three playful concepts stem out from this principle: (1) playing with tension; (2) playing with peripheral vision; and (3) playing without looking. We operationalise each concept with game prototypes that pose different challenges based on visual attention, perception in the wider visual eld, and the ability to move the eyes with the eyelids closed. These demonstrate that ideas tested playfully can lead to useful solutions. Finally, we look across our work to distil guidelines to design with "not looking" interactions, the use of dramatisation to support the integration of gaze interaction in the game, and the exploration of interactive experiences only possible when taking input from the eyes. We aim to inspire the future of gaze-enabled games with new directions by proposing that there is more to the eyes than where players look