Evaluating Accuracy of Eye Gaze Controlled Interface in Military Aviation Environment

Eye gaze controlled interfaces allow us to directly manipulate a graphical user interface just by looking at it. It has already been explored for assistive technology. Eye gaze controlled interface has great potential use in military aviation. In particular, operating different displays in situations where pilots' hands are occupied with flying the aircraft. This paper reports two studies on analyzing accuracy of eye gaze controlled interface inside aircraft undertaking representative flying missions. We reported that pilots can undertake representative pointing and selection tasks at less than 2 sees on average and the accuracy of COTS eye gaze tracking glass is less than 5° of visual angle up to +3G, although it is less accurate at ‒1G and +5G. We used these results in developing a multimodal head and eye gaze movement based HMDS and in a user study involving standard ISO 9241 pointing task. The average pointing and selection times was significantly lower in the proposed system compared to traditional TDS.