Gaze Guidance through Peripheral Stimuli

Guiding gaze using near-peripheral vision improves gaze-contingent-display efficiency by reducing display response latency. We propose a new approach for controlling exploration of static displays through near-peripheral stimuli, and report results of an evaluation of its effectiveness. 10 participants viewed full screen displays of 60 blurred pictures (Gaussian filtering). As soon as a fixation (first strategy) or a gaze sample (second strategy) was detected next to the current stimulus, the area surrounding it was deblurred. An image was totally deblurred when all stimuli had thus attracted the user's gaze. Stimuli are blinking deblurred circles (radius: 1 deg visual angle). They appear in predefined positions on the screen, one at a time. For each picture, successive stimulus positions on the screen reproduce observed gaze patterns. The current stimulus is visible only if the visual angle between its position on the screen and the position of the user's current fixation is superior to 8 deg (to avoid users noticing it) and inferior to 14 deg. (near-periphery upper limit). Eye movements are detected through an ASL-H6 eye-tracker (120 Hz). Stimulus saliency is estimated, for each picture and stimulus, from contrast ratio and sum of squared differences between blurred and deblurred area around the stimulus