Tracing Shapes with Eyes: Design and Evaluation of an Eye Tracking Based Approach

Eye tracking systems can provide people with severe motor impairments a way to communicate through gaze-based interactions. Such systems transform a user's gaze input into mouse pointer coordinates that can trigger keystrokes on an on-screen keyboard. However, typing using this approach requires large back-and-forth eye movements, and the required effort depends both on the length of the text and the keyboard layout. Motivated by the idea of sketch-based image search, we explore a gaze-based approach where users draw a shape on a sketchpad using gaze input, and the shape is used to search for similar letters, words, and other predefined controls. The sketch-based approach is area efficient (compared to an on-screen keyboard), allows users to create custom commands, and creates opportunities for gaze-based authentication. Since variation in the drawn shapes makes the search difficult, the system can show a guide (e.g., a 14-segment digital display) on the sketchpad so that users can trace their desired shape. In this paper, we take a first step that investigates the feasibility of the sketch-based approach, by examining how well users can trace a given shape using gaze input. We designed an interface where participants traced a set of given shapes. We then compared the similarity of the drawn and traced shapes. Our study results show the potential of the sketch-based approach: users were able to trace shapes reasonably well using gaze input, even for complex shapes involving three letters; shape tracing accuracy for gaze was better than 'free-form' hand drawing. We also report on how different shape complexities influence the time and accuracy of the shape tracing tasks.