Comparing Gaze, Head and Controller Selection of Dynamically Revealed Targets in Head-Mounted Displays.

This paper presents a head-mounted virtual reality study that compared gaze, head, and controller pointing for selection of dynamically revealed targets. Existing studies on head-mounted 3D interaction have focused on pointing and selection tasks where all targets are visible to the user. Our study compared the effects of screen width (field of view), target amplitude and width, and prior knowledge of target location on modality performance. Results show that gaze and controller pointing are significantly faster than head pointing and that increased screen width only positively impacts performance up to a certain point. We further investigated the applicability of existing pointing models. Our analysis confirmed the suitability of previously proposed two-component models for all modalities while uncovering differences for gaze at known and unknown target positions. Our findings provide new empirical evidence for understanding input with gaze, head, and controller and are significant for applications that extend around the user.

Weighted Pointer: Error-aware Gaze-based Interaction through Fallback Modalities.

Gaze-based interaction is a fast and ergonomic type of hands-free interaction that is often used with augmented and virtual reality when pointing at targets. Such interaction, however, can be cumbersome whenever user, tracking, or environmental factors cause eye tracking errors. Recent research has suggested that fallback modalities could be leveraged to ensure stable interaction irrespective of the current level of eye tracking error. This work thus presents Weighted Pointer interaction, a collection of error-aware pointing techniques that determine whether pointing should be performed by gaze, a fallback modality, or a combination of the two, depending on the level of eye tracking error that is present. These techniques enable users to accurately point at targets when eye tracking is accurate and inaccurate. A virtual reality target selection study demonstrated that Weighted Pointer techniques were more performant and preferred over techniques that required the use of manual modality switching.