17-05-2013, 01:06 PM
Eye Movement-Based HumanComputer Interaction Techniques: Toward Non-Command Interfaces
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ABSTRACT:
User-computer dialogues are typically one-sided, with the bandwidth from computer to user far greater than that from user to computer. The movement of a user’s eyes can provide a convenient, natural, and high-bandwidth source of additional user input, to help redress this imbalance. We therefore investigate the introduction of eye movements as a computer input medium.
Our emphasis is on the study of interaction techniques that incorporate eye movements into the user-computer dialogue in a convenient and natural way. It discusses some of the human factors and technical considerations that arise in
trying to use eye movements as an input medium, describes our approach and the first eye movement-based interaction techniques that we have devised and implemented experiences and observations on them, and considers eye movement-based interaction as an exemplar of a new, more general class of non-command-based user-computer interaction.
INTRODUCTION:
In searching for better interfaces between users and their computers, an additional modeof communication between the two parties would be of great use. The problem of humancomputer interaction can be viewed as two powerful information processors (human and computer) attempting to communicate with each other via a narrow-bandwidth, highly constrained interface Faster, more natural, more convenient (and, articularly, more parallel, less sequential) means for users and computers to exchange information are needed to increase the useful bandwidth across that interface. On the user’s side, the constraints are in the nature of the communication organs and abilities with which humans are endowed; on the computer side, the only constraint is the range of devices and interaction techniques that we can invent and their performance. Current technology has been stronger in the computer-to-user direction than user-to-computer, hence today’s user-computer dialogues are typically one-sided, with the bandwidth from the computer to the user far greater than that from user to computer. We are especially interested in input media that can help redress this imbalance by obtaining data from the user conveniently and rapidly. We therefore investigate the possibility of using the movements of a user’s eyes to provide a high-bandwidth source of additional user input. While the technology for measuring a user’s visual line of gaze (where he or she is looking in space) and reporting it in real time has been improving, what is needed is appropriate interaction techniques that incorporate eye movements into the user-computer dialogue in a convenient and natural way. An interaction technique is a way of using a physical input device to perform a generic task in a human-computer dialogue
NON-COMMAND INTERFACE STYLES:
Eye movement-based interaction is one of several areas of current research in humancomputer interaction in which a new interface style seems to be emerging. It represents a change in input from objects for the user to actuate by specific commands to passive equipment that simply senses parameters of the user’s body. Jakob Nielsen describes this property as non-command-based:
The fifth generation user interface paradigm seems to be centered around noncommand based dialogues. This term is a somewhat negative way of characterizing a new form of interaction but so far, the unifying concept does seem to be exactly the abandonment of the principle underlying all earlier paradigms: That a dialogue has to be controlled by specific and precise commands issued by the user and processed and replied to by the computer. The new interfaces are often not even dialogues in the traditional meaning of the word, even though they obviously can be analyzed as having some dialogue content at some level since they do involve the exchange of information between a user and a computer.
PERSPECTIVES ON EYE MOVEMENT-BASED INTERACTION:
As with other areas of user interface design, considerable leverage can be obtained by
drawing analogies that use people’s already-existing skills for operating in the natural environment and searching for ways to apply them to communicating with a computer. Direct manipulation interfaces have enjoyed great success, particularly with novice users, largely because they draw on analogies to existing human skills (pointing, grabbing, moving objects in physical space), rather than trained behaviors; and virtual realities offer the promise of usefully exploiting people’s existing physical navigation and manipulation abilities. These notions are more difficult to extend to eye movement-based interaction, since few objects in the real world respond to people’s eye movements. The principal exception is, of course, other people: they detect and respond to being looked at directly and, to a lesser and much less precise degree, to what else one may be looking at. In describing eye movement-based human-computer interaction we can draw two distinctions: one is in the nature of the user’s eye movements and the other, in the nature of the responses.