Mouse vs. Gaze

Gaze interaction differs from the mouse mainly on some aspects. First, it is not mechanical. This means that the X,Y position will always, more or less, move while the mouse remains exactly the same if left alone. Second, there is no clicking to activate functions. Initial ideas might be to blink but it does not stand for a permanent solution since we blink out of reflexes all the time. Third, we use our eyes to investigate the environment. Performing gestures such as looking left-right-left is not natural. In other words, performing motor tasks with our eyes does not feel right. The eyes keeps track of the state of the world and the interface should provide just this.

It's time to investigate how how to optimally provide the user with a good sense of feedback. In most areas of software interfaces the phenomenon of roll-over highlighting has been very successful. For example when you move the mouse over buttons they change background color or show a small animation. This type of feedback is crucial for building good interfaces. It shows the user exactly what function can be executed and gives a good clue on what to expect. My initial idea is to throw a grid of gray buttons on the screen, lets say 6 x 6, and change their background color when the gaze enters.

How to solve this?
Even if we are developing a new type of interface it doesn't necessarily mean that we should turn our back on the world as we know it. Most programming languages today support the mouse and keyboard as the main input devices. This provides us with a range of functionality that could be useful, even for developing gaze interfaces.

For example, most U.I components such as button or images have methods and properties that are bound to mouse events. These are usually defined as OnMouseOver or MouseEnter etc. These events can be used to execute specific parts of the code, for example to change the color of a button or detect when a user clicks an object.

Somehow we need to take control over the mouse and replace the X and Y coordinates it receives from the input device with the gaze X/Y coordinates we have extracted from the eye tracker. After a day of searching, trying and curing headaches this turns out to be possible.

Follow me to the next post and I'll show how it's done =)