EyeWindows: evaluation of eye-controlled zooming windows for focus selection

  • Authors:

  • David Fono;Roel Vertegaal

  • Affiliations:

  • Queen's University, Kingston, Canada;Queen's University, Kingston, Canada

  • Venue:
  • Proceedings of the SIGCHI Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems
  • Year:
  • 2005

Quantified Score

Hi-index 0.01

Visualization

Abstract

In this paper, we present an attentive windowing technique that uses eye tracking, rather than manual pointing, for focus window selection. We evaluated the performance of 4 focus selection techniques: eye tracking with key activation, eye tracking with automatic activation, mouse and hotkeys in a typing task with many open windows. We also evaluated a zooming windowing technique designed specifically for eye-based control, comparing its performance to that of a stan-dard tiled windowing environment. Results indicated that eye tracking with automatic activation was, on average, about twice as fast as mouse and hotkeys. Eye tracking with key activation was about 72% faster than manual conditions, and preferred by most participants. We believe eye input performed well because it allows manual input to be provided in parallel to focus selection tasks. Results also suggested that zooming windows outperform static tiled windows by about 30%. Furthermore, this performance gain scaled with the number of windows used. We conclude that eye-controlled zooming windows with key activation pro-vides an efficient and effective alternative to current focus window selection techniques.