Friday, March 7, 2008

Inspiration: All Eyes on the Monitor (Mollenbach et al, 2008)

Going further with the Zooming User Interface (ZUI) is the prototype descibed in the "All Eyes on the Monitor: Gaze Based Interaction in Zoomable, Multi-Scaled Information-Space" (E. Mollenbach, T. Stefansson, J-P Hansen) developed at the Loughborough University in the U.K and the ITU INC, Denmark. It employes the gaze based pan/zoom interaction style which is suitable for gaze interaction to resolve the inaccuracy (target sizes increase when zooming in to them) Additionally, the results indicate that for certain tasks gaze based interaction is faster than traditional mouse operation.



ABSTRACT
The experiment described in this paper, shows a test environment constructed with two information spaces; one large with 2000 nodes ordered in semi-structured groups in which participants performed search and browse tasks; the other was smaller and designed for precision zooming, where subjects performed target selection simulation tasks. For both tasks, modes of gaze- and mouse-controlled navigation were compared. The results of the browse and search tasks showed that the performances of the most efficient mouse and gaze implementations were indistinguishable. However, in the target selection simulation tasks the most efficient gaze control proved to be about 16% faster than the most efficient mouse-control. The results indicate that gaze-controlled pan/zoom navigation is a viable alternative to mouse control in inspection and target exploration of large, multi-scale environments. However, supplementing mouse control with gaze navigation also holds interesting potential for interface and interaction design. Download paper (pdf)

The paper was presented at the annual International Conference for Intelligent Interfaces (IUI) that was held in Maspalomas, Gran Canaria between 13-16th January 2008.

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