A Fitts' law study of pupil dilations in a head-mounted display

Abstract

Head-mounted displays offer full control over lighting conditions. When equipped with eye tracking technology, they are well suited for experiments investigating pupil dilation in response to cognitive tasks, emotional stimuli, and motor task complexity, particularly for studies that would otherwise have required the use of a chinrest, since the eye cameras are fixed with respect to the head. This paper analyses pupil dilations for 13 out of 27 participants completing a Fitts' law task using a virtual reality headset with built-in eye tracking. The largest pupil dilation occurred for the condition subjectively rated as requiring the most physical and mental effort. Fitts' index of difficulty had no significant effect on pupil dilation, suggesting differences in motor task complexity may not affect pupil dilation.