Few weeks ago we had the Channel 5 from St. Petersburg shooting in our lab for their programme Progress. Have a look how we did (the eye-tracking bit in the stream starts around 9:55, our appearances around 15:00 and later).
As I mentioned earlier, we started working on gaze-aware interfaces during autumn 2006. One of the fruits of that research has now been published in the proceedings of the International Conference on Computers in Education, ICCE 2008 (paper is here).
We did a simple questionnaire-based analysis. The results of the analysis show some promises for implementing gaze-augmented problem-solving interfaces. Users of gaze-augmented interaction felt more immersed than the users of other two modes – dwell-time based and computer mouse. Immersion, engagement, and user-experience in general are important aspects in educational interfaces; learners engage in completing the tasks and, for example, when facing a difficult task they do not give up that easily. We also did analysis of the strategies, and we will report on those soon.
We could not attend the conference, but didn’t want to disappoint eventual audience. We thus decided to send a video instead of us. Have a look at it here. It feels that making the video was actually more time demanding than going to Taiwan and delivering the presentation. In addition, the lack of feedback is also worrying. Finally, we are not really media professionals, and you can hear and see it in the video (feedback of what could have been done better is welcome, use comments please!)
On Wednesday, I’ve got the permission to print. In last couple of days I was finalizing the thesis. Printing SHOULD and not shall (yes J. J. R. was here) be on Monday. Thanks everybody for support.
There it goes; now it is, for a while, out of my hands.
What next?
It is difficult to do one non-trivial task that requires attention with one hand and other task with the other hand; especially without practicing. Try, for example, balancing a pen on the forefinger of your right hand, while typing with your left hand. Playing piano both-hands is that kind of task that needs practicing. (What actually happens in piano playing is that as the artists develop their expertise, they will not anymore waste the precious visual attention on their hands.)
A step to make this even more challenging is to control two things simultaneously using one hand only. Try this game. (Don’t blame me if it took your working day away.)
Here are my scores in the orders of trials (technical-errors excluded): 3.532, 6.177, 7.265, 15.143, 9.731, 9.84, 8.4, 4.9, 17.086, 7.76, 11.434, 9.851, 21.841, 12.907.
It seems there are some peaks in the performance with increasing number of trials. After each of the peaks the performance for a while stabilizes on a level that is higher that the level before the peak. In other words, some learning seems to take place. What I’d like to see, however, is how visual attention patterns develop with the trials. Anybody is interested to come for a short time being eye-tracked?
During last spring our mini research group on eye-tracking sharply expanded from one to about four members, as we got some talented master-students. Among others, we came up with two interesting topics, Tersia has been working on a gaze-aware game interface and Alfya is implementing a gaze-added digital-tv interface.
These topics were motivated by the fact that at the moment there are not many applications that would utilize gaze-direction as an interaction modality. I believe that one way of promoting the gaze-aware interaction and thereby decreasing the curently high prices of eye-tracking is to create more applications that make use of the eye. (About current efforts in decreasing the prices of eye-tracking, look at $1 000 000 challenge here).
To our great suprise, this call for student competition in creating gaze-aware interfaces has arrived last week. To me it indicates that our thoughts during the spring were heading in the right direction. So, both Alfya and Tersia will submit their applications and I wish they both can win the main prize!
Later durign the fall we will invite you all to come and test our new stuff, check back soon!