Comparison of head gaze and head and eye gaze within an immersive environment

For efficient collaboration between participants, eye gaze is seen as being critical for interaction. Teleconferencing systems such as the AcessGrid allow users to meet across geographically disparate rooms but as of now there seems no substitute for face to face meetings. This paper gives an overview of some preliminary work that looks towards integrating eye gaze into an immersive collaborative virtual environment and assessing the impact that this would have on interaction between the users of such a system. An experiment was conducted to assess the difference between users' abilities to judge what objects an avatar is looking at with only head gaze being viewed and also with eye and head gaze data being displayed. The results from the experiment show that eye gaze is of vital importance to the subjects correctly identifying what a person is looking at in an immersive virtual environment. This is followed by a description of how the eye tracking system has been integrated into an immersive collaborative virtual environment and some preliminary results from the use of such a system