A new gaze-based interface for environmental control

Abstract

This paper describes a new control system interface which utilises the user's eye gaze to enable severely disabled individuals control electronic devices easily. The system is based upon a novel human computer interface, which facilitates simple control of electronic devices by predicting and responding to the user's possible intentions, based intuitively upon their point of gaze. The interface responds by automatically pre-selecting and offering only those controls appropriate to the specific device that the user looks at, in a simple and accessible manner. It therefore affords the user conscious choice of the appropriate range of control actions required, which may be executed by simple means and without the need to navigate manually through potentially complex control menus to reach them. Two systems using the head-mounted and the remote eye tracker respectively are introduced, compared and evaluated in this paper. © Springer-Verlag Berlin Heidelberg 2007.