Design and Development of Game-based Oculomotor Training using Eye Tracking

Many people have oculomotor issues. This means that they have a problem with how their eyes behave, or more importantly how they behave together. These issues are present both in children and adults and could lead to the patient being insecure in crowds, disoriented or having trouble reading. This thesis will focus on creating a computer application for oculomotor training. It will cover most of the important primitive eye movements, and in some cases combine them with other cognitive abilities. The application consists of six games, together covering the most important fields in a table provided by vision teacher Tina Ihler. This table contains the most important parts in oculomotor training and includes examples of how the different issues can be trained. The games cover about ¾ of the challenges presented here, because not all the areas were possible to train without real depth perception. Most of the games use eye tracking as the main input method. This makes the user able to control the game behavior using their vision, either by gaze-based or gaze-added interaction. This application uses both, and for the gaze-added interaction both the spacebar and the mouse functions as a sufficient additional input method. The application has been tested by multiple vision teachers who filled out a pre-defined form. They all considered the application to be a potential supplement to the existing training methods, but not as something that could completely replace it. An in-depth evaluation showed that the main reason it cannot replace existing methods is the lack of depth perception and other cognitive abilities in connection with the eyes. On the other hand, it showed that eye tracking is a very good tool for training some oculomotor issues