Gaze Point Display

[Andrew Stannard]

Hi,

I’m using the EyeX for an HTML based application, and it’s working fine via using a button/key to emulate a mouse click. However it would be nice to show some feedback to the user as to where they’re looking on the screen before they instigate a click.

Without a Javascript SDK at the moment, I think I’m correct in saying that the only way to do this is to activate the display of Gaze Point using Ctrl + Shift + F12.

This works, but the large number of dots displayed is proving very distracting for the user. Is there a way of controlling this display so that it only shows an averaged gaze point?

Or alternatively any other way of displaying gaze point? Perhaps it might be possible to run a C++ program in the background that just draws the gaze point onto the screen, without intefering in either the graphics or operation of the HTML based app?

Any help appreciated,

Thanks,
Andy.

[Jenny [Tobii]]

Hi Andrew,

My own experience (after a couple of years of working with eye tracking) is that I find anything that follows my Gaze Point around on the screen quite distracting, and always switch such features off quickly. It becomes especially annoying if there is even a slight offset so that the Gaze Point visualization is not completely centered in the visual field, and the vision reflex kicks in that moves the eyes towards the (periferal) moving object and the eye-gaze starts drifting along the direction of the offset.

What I do like, on the other hand, is some visible feedback in connection with clicking. The best approach is typically some kind of discreet highlight on the button or thing that is about to be clicked. A discreet highlight could be to change the button text color from gray to white for example. I also prefer when highlights are only shown just when I’m about to select something – for example when pressing down a selection key. Highlighting the full surface of a button is usually too distracting, and having highlights just by looking around in the GUI I think gives the UI a flickery appearance (this is probably because looking around usually happens uncounsciously and it becomes distracting when this process is brought to conscious awereness).

That is how I like it anyway, take it or leave it 🙂

[Andrew Stannard]

Hi,

Thanks for the reply. Some good points you haver made regarding UI design for Eye Tracker based applications.

I’ll have a look and see what can be done. With no Javascript SDK at the moment (any timescales?), then I believe I’m correct in saying that it is not possible to know where someone is looking until they press a button/key?

The app is being used to demo eye tracking to number of users at once. The reason for wanting to show the gaze point in an interactive manner is more for the benefit of the watching audience than for the actual user. Without the display it can be hard for 3rd party observers to understand what’s going on.

THanks,
Andy.

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