Assessing the Usability of Gaze-Adapted Interface against Conventional Eye-Based Input Emulation

In recent years, eye tracking systems have greatly improved, beginning to play a promising role as an input medium. Eye trackers can be used for application control either by simply emulating the mouse and keyboard devices in the traditional graphical user interface, or by customized interfaces for eye gaze events. In this work, we evaluate these two approaches to assess their impact in usability. We present a gaze-adapted Twitter application interface with direct interaction of eye gaze input, and compare it to Twitter in a conventional browser interface with gaze-based mouse and keyboard emulation. We conducted an experimental study, which indicates a significantly better subjective user experience for the gaze-adapted approach. Based on the results, we argue the need of user interfaces interacting directly to eye gaze input to provide an improved user experience, more specifically in the field of accessibility.