Ergonomic and Human-Centered Design of Wearable Gaming Controller Using Eye Movements and Facial Expressions

The future technologies should center around the human beings. How to let human interact with various state-of-the-art technologies in a straightforward and intuitive way is a grand challenge. Currently human uses hands to interact with the world, however, there are so many scenarios that human is not able to use his hands to control multiple devices/equipment at the same time, for instance, while the hands are busy at carrying stuffs, driving or riding a bicycle. Oftentimes, people do not want to use voice command either. But humans are really good at multi-model interactions using body languages, eye and facial gestures to communicate with each other. It provides a good hint to use eye movements and facial expressions as a compensation to other existing interaction interfaces. In this research project, we aim to build a wearable device that is extremely compact, non-obtrusive, which can be worn comfortably for long hours to identify eye movements and facial expressions. We develop our product - EXGbuds to evaluate this idea of controlling the games in an engaging way.