User defined eye movement-based interaction for virtual reality

Abstract

Most of the applications of eye movement-based interaction in VR are limited to blinking and gaze at present, however, gaze gestures were neglected. Therefore, the potential of eye movement-based interaction in VR is far from being realized. In addition, many scholars tried to define some special eye movements as input instructions, but these definitions are almost always empirical and neglect users’ habits and cultural background. In this paper, we focus on how Chinese users interact in VR using eye movements without relying on a graphical user interface. We present a guessability study focusing on intuitive eye movement-based interaction of common commands in 30 tasks of 3 categories in VR. A total of 360 eye movements were collected from 12 users and a consensus set of eye movements in VR that best met user’s cognition was obtained. This set can be applied to the design of eye movement-based interaction in VR to help designers to develop user-centered and intuitive eye movement-based interaction in VR. Meanwhile this set can be migrated to other interactive media and user interfaces, such as a Post-WIMP interface base on eye movement-based interaction, as a reference to design.