Facilitating Gaze Interaction Using the Gap and Overlap Effects

Many results from psychophysics have indicated that the latency of saccadic eye movements is affected by how new visual stimuli is presented. In this paper we show how two such results, known as the gap effect (GE) and overlap condition (OC), can be used to improve gaze interaction. We have chosen a dwell time based eye typing application, since eye typing can be easily modeled as a sequence of eye movements from one key to the next. By modeling how dwell time selection is performed, we show how the GE and OC can be used to generate visual feedback that facilitates the eye movement to the next key. A pilot experiment was conducted in which participants had to type short phrases on a virtual keyboard using 2 different visual feedback methods, one traditional feedback based on animation and a new feedback scheme using the GE and OC. Results show that using a feedback that exploits these phenomena facilitates eye movements and can improve eye typing user experience and performance.