Look to Go: An Empirical Evaluation of Eye-Based Travel in Virtual Reality

We present two experiments evaluating the effectiveness of the eye as a controller for travel in virtual reality (VR). We used the FOVE head-mounted display (HMD), which includes an eye tracker. The first experiment compared seven different travel techniques to control movement direction while flying through target rings. The second experiment involved travel on a terrain: moving to waypoints while avoiding obstacles with three travel techniques. Results of the first experiment indicate that performance of the eye tracker with head-tracking was close to head motion alone, and better than eye-tracking alone. The second experiment revealed that completion times of all three techniques were very close. Overall, eye-based travel suffered from calibration issues and yielded much higher cybersickness than head-based approaches.