Gaze-Recapturing Editor Cursor (GREC)

 

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 full of ideas for human-computer interaction

[talk]                                slides about this issue