Gameplay experience in a gaze interaction game

Assessing gameplay experience for gaze interaction games is a challenging task. For this study, a gaze interaction Half-Life 2 game modification was created that allowed eye tracking control. The mod was deployed during an experiment at Dreamhack 2007, where participants had to play with gaze navigation and afterwards rate their gameplay experience. The results show low tension and negative affects scores on the gameplay experience questionnaire as well as high positive challenge, immersion and flow ratings. The correlation between spatial presence and immersion for gaze interaction was high and yields further investigation. It is concluded that gameplay experience can be correctly assessed with the methodology presented in this paper.Comment: pages 49-54, The 5th Conference on Communication by Gaze Interaction - COGAIN 2009: Gaze Interaction For Those Who Want It Most, ISBN: 978-87-643-0475-

Trends and Techniques in Visual Gaze Analysis

Visualizing gaze data is an effective way for the quick interpretation of eye tracking results. This paper presents a study investigation benefits and limitations of visual gaze analysis among eye tracking professionals and researchers. The results were used to create a tool for visual gaze analysis within a Master's project.Comment: pages 89-93, The 5th Conference on Communication by Gaze Interaction - COGAIN 2009: Gaze Interaction For Those Who Want It Most, ISBN: 978-87-643-0475-

BimodalGaze:Seamlessly Refined Pointing with Gaze and Filtered Gestural Head Movement

Eye gaze is a fast and ergonomic modality for pointing but limited in precision and accuracy. In this work, we introduce BimodalGaze, a novel technique for seamless head-based refinement of a gaze cursor. The technique leverages eye-head coordination insights to separate natural from gestural head movement. This allows users to quickly shift their gaze to targets over larger fields of view with naturally combined eye-head movement, and to refine the cursor position with gestural head movement. In contrast to an existing baseline, head refinement is invoked automatically, and only if a target is not already acquired by the initial gaze shift. Study results show that users reliably achieve fine-grained target selection, but we observed a higher rate of initial selection errors affecting overall performance. An in-depth analysis of user performance provides insight into the classification of natural versus gestural head movement, for improvement of BimodalGaze and other potential applications

A psychophysiological logging system for a digital game modification

This internship thesis intends to facilitate cognitive experiments for gameplay experience studies. To achieve this a psychophysiological logging framework was developed, which automatically reports the occurrence of specific game events to a log file and to the parallel port. Via the parallel port the communication with psychophysiological systems is possible. Thus, psychophysiological data can be correlated with in-game data in real-time. In addition, this framework is able to log viewed game objects via eye tracker integration. This gives some information on how certain game elements affect the player’s attention. For the development of this system the Source SDK, the game engine of Half-Life 2, has been used. Consequently, custom-built Half-Life 2 levels had to be developed, which are suitable for cognitive experiments. In this context, tools for level editing will be introduced. This thesis shapes the basis for further research work in the area of psychophysiological software development and is intended to facilitate this for future scholars facing these issues.Accepted and Published by Department for Simulation and Graphics, Faculty of Computer Science, Otto-von-Guericke University Magdeburg, German

A psychophysiological logging system for a digital game modification

This internship thesis intends to facilitate cognitive experiments for gameplay experience studies. To achieve this a psychophysiological logging framework was developed, which automatically reports the occurrence of specific game events to a log file and to the parallel port. Via the parallel port the communication with psychophysiological systems is possible. Thus, psychophysiological data can be correlated with in-game data in real-time. In addition, this framework is able to log viewed game objects via eye tracker integration. This gives some information on how certain game elements affect the player’s attention. For the development of this system the Source SDK, the game engine of Half-Life 2, has been used. Consequently, custom-built Half-Life 2 levels had to be developed, which are suitable for cognitive experiments. In this context, tools for level editing will be introduced. This thesis shapes the basis for further research work in the area of psychophysiological software development and is intended to facilitate this for future scholars facing these issues.Accepted and Published by Department for Simulation and Graphics, Faculty of Computer Science, Otto-von-Guericke University Magdeburg, German

4th International Workshop on Pervasive Eye Tracking and Mobile Eye-Based Interaction

Pfeiffer T, Stellmach S, Sugano Y. 4th International Workshop on Pervasive Eye Tracking and Mobile Eye-Based Interaction. In: UbiComp'14 Adjunct: The 2014 ACM Conference on Ubiquitous Computing Adjunct Publication. Seattle, WA, USA: ACM; 2014: 1085-1092.Previous work on eye tracking and eye-based human-computer interfaces mainly concentrated on making use of the eyes in traditional desktop settings. With the recent growth of interest in smart glass devices and low-cost eye trackers, however, gaze-based techniques for mobile computing is becoming increasingly important. PETMEI 2014 focuses on the pervasive eye tracking paradigm as a trailblazer for mobile eye-based interaction and eye-based context-awareness. We want to stimulate and explore the creativity of these communities with respect to the implications, key research challenges, and new applications for pervasive eye tracking in ubiquitous computing. The long-term goal is to create a strong interdisciplinary research community linking these fields together and to establish the workshop as the premier forum for research on pervasive eye tracking

Advanced Gaze Visualizations for Three-dimensional Virtual Environments

Gaze visualizations represent an effective way for gaining fast insights into eye tracking data. Current approaches do not adequately support eye tracking studies for three-dimensional (3D) virtual environments. Hence, we propose a set of advanced gaze visualization techniques for supporting gaze behavior analysis in such environments. Similar to commonly used gaze visualizations for two-dimensional stimuli (e.g., images and websites), we contribute advanced 3D scan paths and 3D attentional maps. In addition, we introduce a models-of-interest timeline depicting viewed models, which can be used for displaying scan paths in a selected time segment. A prototype toolkit is also discussed which combines an implementation of our proposed techniques. Their potential for facilitating eye tracking studies in virtual environments was supported by a user study among eye tracking and visualization experts