Look and lean: accurate head-assisted eye pointing

Abstract

Compared to the mouse, eye pointing is inaccurate. As a consequence, small objects are difficult to point by gaze alone. We suggest using a combination of eye pointing and subtle head movements to achieve accurate hands-free pointing in a conventional desktop computing environment. For tracking the head movements, we exploited information of the eye position in the eye tracker's camera view. We conducted a series of three experiments to study the potential caveats and benefits of using head movements to adjust gaze cursor position. Results showed that head-assisted eye pointing significantly improves the pointing accuracy without a negative impact on the pointing time. In some cases participants were able to point almost 3 times closer to the target's center, compared to the eye pointing alone (7 vs. 19 pixels). We conclude that head assisted eye pointing is a comfortable and potentially very efficient alternative for other assisting methods in the eye pointing, such as zooming.