Manual and gaze input cascaded (MAGIC) pointing

  • Authors:
  • Shumin Zhai;Carlos Morimoto;Steven Ihde

  • Affiliations:
  • IBM Almaden Research Center, 650 Harry Road, San Jose, CA;IBM Almaden Research Center, 650 Harry Road, San Jose, CA;IBM Almaden Research Center, 650 Harry Road, San Jose, CA

  • Venue:
  • Proceedings of the SIGCHI conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems
  • Year:
  • 1999

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Abstract

This work explores a new direction in utilizing eye gaze forcomputer input. Gaze tracking has long been considered as analternative or potentially superior pointing method for computerinput. We believe that many fundamental limitations exist withtraditional gaze pointing. In particular, it is unnatural tooverload a perceptual channel such as vision with a motor controltask. We therefore propose an alternative approach, dubbed MAGIC(Manual And Gaze Input Cascaded) pointing. With such an approach,pointing appears to the user to be a manual task, used for finemanipulation and selection. However, a large portion of the cursormovement is eliminated by warping the cursor to the eye gaze area,which encompasses the target. Two specific MAGIC pointingtechniques, one conservative and one liberal, were designed,analyzed, and implemented with an eye tracker we developed. Theywere then tested in a pilot study. This early- stage explorationshowed that the MAGIC pointing techniques might offer manyadvantages, including reduced physical effort and fatigue ascompared to traditional manual pointing, greater accuracy andnaturalness than traditional gaze pointing, and possibly fasterspeed than manual pointing. The pros and cons of the two techniquesare discussed in light of both performance data and subjectivereports.