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).
It seems that joint attention has been well studied in several interesting domains. For example, development and evolutionary studies (do not mix with international development) have confirmed that our elaboration of the skills related to joint attention are our main advantage against other species. Other major contributions are then from monkey research. Somebody even studied dolphins. The latest attempts focus on implementing architectures that imitate the shared visual attention mechanisms! So we have robots, to top the bunch.
Now, we will be researching programmers’ shared (visual) attention. Imagine that extreme title of this post as an upcoming paper title!
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!)