Eye movement tracking as a new promising modality for human computer interaction

It is well known that eye movement tracking may reveal information about human intentions. Therefore, it seems that it would be easy to use gaze pointing as a replacement for other traditional human computer interaction modalities like e.g. mouse or trackball, especially when there are more and more affordable eye trackers available. However, it occurs that gaze contingent interfaces are often experienced as difficult and tedious by users. There are multiple reasons of these difficulties. First of all eye tracking requires prior calibration, which is unnatural for users. Secondly, gaze continent interfaces suffer from a so called Midas Touch problem, because it is difficult to detect a moment when a user wants to click a button or any other object on a screen. Eye pointing is also not as precise and accurate as e.g. mouse pointing. The paper presents problems concerned with gaze contingent interfaces and compares the usage of gaze, mouse and touchpad during a very simple shooting game.