Using Eye Tracking to Improve Information Retrieval in Virtual Reality

• Published in: 2018 IEEE International Symposium on Mixed and Augmented Reality Adjunct (ISMAR-Adjunct) pp. 242 - 243
• Main Authors: McNamara, Ann, Boyd, Katherine, Oh, David, Sharpe, Ryan, Suther, Annie
• Format: Conference Proceeding
• Language: English
• Published: IEEE 01-10-2018
• Subjects: Augmented reality; Clutter; Gaze tracking; Human-centered computing-Visualization-Visualization design and evaluation methods; Human-centered computing-Visualization-Visualization techniques-Treemaps; Information retrieval; Task analysis; Visualization
• DOI: 10.1109/ISMAR-Adjunct.2018.00076

Virtual Reality (VR) has the potential to transform the way we work, rest and play. This promise comes with new challenges. One challenge stems from the interactive nature of immersive Virtual Environments (VEs). Placement of contextual information in VEs can be critical to the user experience. This poster describes the use of eye-tracking to alleviate usability issues surrounding information presentation in immersive VEs. Results from our experiments show that integrating eye tracking into a VE to dictate where and when textual information is presented can improve performance when searching for contextual information. In summary, the results show improvement in task performance when the new direct method is employed to reveal information in target regions based on gaze. This seems to hold true independent of the VE or the type of information questioned.