UIST 2007: Gaze-enhanced Scrolling Techniques

UIST 2007

Gaze-enhanced Scrolling Techniques

Manu Kumar, Terry Winograd

In this paper the authors present several possible ways of using eye gaze detection to make reading text easier, and also present a few other interactions made possible by gaze detection. For the text reading system they had two main types: manual scrolling with gaze enhancement and automatic scrolling of various types.

Manual scrolling with gaze enhancement lets the user use page up and page down to manually go to the next section of text. However as the user pages, the system detects which line they were reading before they paged and highlights it in its new position once the text has finished moving.

Automatic scrolling came in a few different forms. The first is "Eye in the Middle" where the system measures the user's reading speed and adjusts the text scroll to match it. Another technique was smooth autoscrolling which had specific zones of control. If the reader was reading towards the top of the page, scrolling would stop. As the reader moves down the page begins scrolling and if the reader is near the bottom the page scrolls even faster. Finally there is an automatic page up and page down, where if the reader looks at the bottom of the screen for a long enough period (150-200 ms) then the page would page down.

In addition to the text, the researchers also created buttons that would be activated by the user looking off the screen in certain directions.

In a very small user study, the researchers found that the gaze enhanced methods were preferred, specifically the ones associated with discrete page up and page down, as the users found it somewhat difficult to read moving text.

I found the whole gaze assisted scrolling techniques interesting, particularly the use of a short activation period when gazing to determine if that was indeed the user's intention to scroll. There could be some very interesting uses for this (for example switching between windows in a desktop environment or somesuch)