How not to become a buffoon in front of a shop window: A solution allowing natural head movement for interaction with a public display

Abstract

The user interaction solution described in this paper was developed in the context of an Intelligent Shop Window (ISW) with an aim to offer a user the interaction solution where system response would be triggered by naturally gazing at products. We have analyzed a possibility to realize such a user interaction solution using gaze tracking and concluded that remote calibration free eye tracking is still a subject of academic research, but that head tracking could be used instead. We argue that conventional use of head tracking requires conscious intentional head movements and thus does not fit into the context of applications such as the ISW. We further describe our experiment aimed to explore how head movements relate to eye movements when looking at objects in a shop window context. We show large variability in head movement and that per individual the gaze-head data could well be approximated with a straight line. Based on these results we propose a new solution that enables natural gaze interaction by means of head tracking. © 2009 Springer Berlin Heidelberg.