Eye tracking and gaze based interaction within immersive virtual environments

Abstract

Our eyes are input sensors which provide our brains with streams of visual data. They have evolved to be extremely efficient, and they will constantly dart to-and-fro to rapidly build up a picture of the salient entities in a viewed scene. These actions are almost subconscious. However, they can provide telling signs of how the brain is decoding the visuals, and can indicate emotional responses, prior to the viewer becoming aware of them. In this paper we discuss a method of tracking a user's eye movements, and use these to calculate their gaze within an immersive virtual environment. We investigate how these gaze patterns can be captured and used to identify viewed virtual objects, and discuss how this can be used as a natural method of interacting with the Virtual Environment. We describe a flexible tool that has been developed to achieve this, and detail initial validating applications that prove the concept. © 2009 Springer Berlin Heidelberg.