Enabling feedback (OnGazeOver)

By taking away the mouse pointer we also take away the feedback on where the acctual "pointer" is. We know where we are looking but this might not be where the eye tracker have measured the gaze vector to be. There is a clear need for feedback to be sure what object is fixated ie. that the right object is chosen.

In the previous post we gained control over the mouse pointer and use this in secret (hidden) to point with the gaze X and Y coordinates. Now we have access to a whole range of triggers and functions such as MouseEnter or IsMouseOver (replace "mouse" with "gaze" and you get the idea)

For the next small test it's time to introduce Windows Presentation Foundation (WPF) and
XAML layout templates. In my opinion the best to come out of Microsoft in a while.

It enables you to create applications (fast) that look and feel like 2008. No more battleship gray control panels and boring layouts. The first advantage I see it the separation of design into XML files (not all different from HTML) and code in traditional .cs files plus a lot of support for things you really want to do (animations, 3D, Internet, media etc.) If you develop Windows applications and have not got around to test WPF yet you certainly give it a spin.

For example the button we for providing the user with feedback on gaze-position can be defined as this:

[Windows1.xaml]

Screenshot, code will render a button in the browser.

The built in trigger supports the IsMouseOver event that the UI component provides, and there is many types of behavior supported. All the styles and behaviors can be defined in groups and templates which enables a very powerful structure thats easy to maintain. Additionally it is rather easy to define your own events that should be fired on f.ex onGazeEnter.

While exploring I've placed buttons like this in 4x4, 5x5, 8x6 and 9x9 grids to test how easily they can be discriminated. The 48 button version seemed to have a reasonable distance between the objects and large enough button area for a stable selection. Real experiments with a whole range of users is needed to make design guidelines like this (further down the line)

Inital version. Providing feedback on gaze position.