Natural gaze behavior as input modality for human-computer interaction

Natural gaze behavior during human-computer interaction provides valuable information about user's cognitive processes and intentions. Including it as an additional input modality therefore provides great potential to improve human-computer interaction. However, the relation between natural gaze behavior and underlying cognitive processes still is unexplored to a large extend. Additionally, most interaction techniques proposed in recent years which incorporate eye gaze as input modality require the user to consciously diverge from natural gaze behavior in order to trigger certain events. In this paper we present results from two user studies. The first one aims at identifying and characterizing major factors which influence natural gaze behavior during human-computer interaction with a focus on the role of user's mental model about the interactive system. We investigate how natural gaze behavior can be influenced by interaction design and point out implications for usage of gaze as additional modality in gaze-based interfaces. With the second user study we demonstrate how gaze-based intention estimation based on analysis of natural gaze behavior can be used to improve interaction in multi-display environments