An investigation into gaze-based interaction techniques for people with motor impairments

The use of eye movements to interact with computers offers opportunities for people with impaired motor ability to overcome the difficulties they often face using hand-held input devices. Computer games have become a major form of entertainment, and also provide opportunities for social interaction in multi-player environments. Games are also being used increasingly in education to motivate and engage young people. It is important that young people with motor impairments are able to benefit from, and enjoy, them. This thesis describes a program of research conducted over a 20-year period starting in the early 1990's that has investigated interaction techniques based on gaze position intended for use by people with motor impairments. The work investigates how to make standard software applications accessible by gaze, so that no particular modification to the application is needed. The work divides into 3 phases. In the first phase, ways of using gaze to interact with the graphical user interfaces of office applications were investigated, designed around the limitations of gaze interaction. Of these, overcoming the inherent inaccuracies of pointing by gaze at on-screen targets was particularly important. In the second phase, the focus shifted from office applications towards immersive games and on-line virtual worlds. Different means of using gaze position and patterns of eye movements, or gaze gestures, to issue commands were studied. Most of the testing and evaluation studies in this, like the first, used participants without motor-impairments. The third phase of the work then studied the applicability of the research findings thus far to groups of people with motor impairments, and in particular,the means of adapting the interaction techniques to individual abilities. In summary, the research has shown that collections of specialised gaze-based interaction techniques can be built as an effective means of completing the tasks in specific types of games and how these can be adapted to the differing abilities of individuals with motor impairments

An investigation into determining head pose for gaze estimation on unmodified mobile devices

Traditionally, devices which are able to determine a users gaze are large, expensive and often restrictive. We investigate the prospect of using common webcams and mobile devices such as laptops, tablets and phones without modification as an alternative means for obtaining a users gaze. A person’s gaze can be fundamentally determined by the pose of the head as well as the orientation of the eyes. This initial work investigates the first of these factors - an estimate of the 3D head pose (and subsequently the positions of the eye centres) relative to a camera device. Specifically, we seek a low cost algorithm that requires only a one-time calibration for an individual user, that can run in real-time on the aforementioned mobile devices with noisy camera data. We use our head tracker to estimate the 4 eye corners of a user over a 10 second video. We present the results at several different frames per second (fps) to analyse the impact on the tracker with lower quality cameras. We show that our algorithm is efficient enough to run at 75fps on a common laptop, but struggles with tracking loss when the fps is lower than 10fps

Visualizing the Reading Activity of People Learning to Read

Several popular visualizations of gaze data, such as scanpaths and heatmaps, can be used independently of the viewing task. For a specific task, such as reading, more informative visualizations can be created. We have developed several such techniques, some dynamic and some static, to communicate the reading activity of children to primary school teachers. The goal of the visualizations was to highlight the reading skills to a teacher with no background in the theory of eye movements or eye tracking technology. Evaluations of the techniques indicate that, as intended, they serve different purposes and were appreciated by the school teachers differently. Dynamic visualizations help to give the teachers a good understanding of how the individual students read. Static visualizations help in getting a simple overview of how the children read as a group and of their active vocabulary

Keeping an eye on the game: Eye gaze interaction with massively multiplayer online games and virtual communities for motor impaired users.

Online virtual communities are becoming increasingly popular both within the able-bodied and disabled user communities. These games assume the use of keyboard and mouse as standard input devices, which in some cases is not appropriate for users with a disability. This paper explores gaze-based interaction methods and highlights the problems associated with gaze control of online virtual worlds. The paper then presents a novel ‘Snap Clutch’ software tool that addresses these problems and enables gaze control. The tool is tested with an experiment showing that effective gaze control is possible although task times are longer. Errors caused by gaze control are identified and potential methods for reducing these are discussed. Finally, the paper demonstrates that gaze driven locomotion can potentially achieve parity with mouse and keyboard driven locomotion, and shows that gaze is a viable modality for game based locomotion both for able-bodied and disabled users alike

What were we all looking at? Identifying objects of collective visual attention

The file attached to this record is the authors final peer reviewed version. The publisher's final version can be found by following the DOI link below.We aim to identify the salient objects in an image by applying a model of visual attention. We automate the process by predicting those objects in an image that are most likely to be the focus of someone’s visual attention. Concretely, we first generate fixation maps from the eye tracking data, which express the ground truth of people’s visual attention for each training image. Then, we extract the high-level features based on the bag-of-visual-words image representation as input attributes along with the fixation maps to train a support vector regression model. With this model, we can predict a new query image’s saliency. Our experiments show that the model is capable of providing a good estimate for human visual attention in test images sets with one salient object and multiple salient objects. In this way, we seek to reduce the redundant information within the scene, and thus provide a more accurate depiction of the scene

Gazing into a Second Life: Gaze-driven adventures, control barriers, and the need for disability privacy in an online virtual world.

Online virtual worlds such as Second Life and World of Warcraft offer users the chance to participate in potentially limitless virtual worlds, all via a standard desktop pc, mouse and keyboard. This paper addresses some of the interaction barriers and privacy concerns that people with disabilities may encounter when using these worlds, and introduces an avatar Turing test that should be passed for worlds to be accessible for all users. The paper then focuses on the needs of high-level motor disabled users who may use gaze control as an input modality for computer interaction. A taxonomy and survey of interaction are introduced, and an experiment in gaze based interaction is conducted within these virtual worlds. The results of the survey highlight the barriers where people with disabilities cannot interact as efficiently as able-bodied users. Finally, the paper discusses methods for enabling gaze based interaction for high-level motor disabled users and calls for game designers to consider disabled users when designing game interfaces

Designing a Gamified System to Promote Health

DOREMI consortiumAlthough gamified health interventions have the potential to enhance the quality of life of older users, there are significant design issues that need to be considered when designing games and gamified systems for an older target market

User performance of gaze-based interaction with on-line virtual communities.

We present the results of an investigation into gaze-based interaction techniques with on-line virtual communities. The purpose of this study was to gain a better understanding of user performance with a gaze interaction technique developed for interacting with 3D graphical on-line communities and games. The study involved 12 participants each of whom carried out 2 equivalent sets of 3 tasks in a world created in Second Life. One set was carried out using a keystroke and mouse emulator driven by gaze, and the other set was carried out with the normal keyboard and mouse.. The study demonstrates that subjects were easily able to perform a set of tasks with eye gaze with only a minimal amount of training. It has also identified the causes of user errors and the amount of performance improvement that could be expected if the causes of these errors can be designed ou