From mconway@microsoft.com Fri Jun 11 20:36:37 1999 Received: from burdell.cc.gatech.edu (root@burdell.cc.gatech.edu [130.207.3.207]) by lennon.cc.gatech.edu (8.9.1/8.9.1) with ESMTP id UAA24521 for ; Fri, 11 Jun 1999 20:36:37 -0400 (EDT) Received: from asbestos.hitl.washington.edu (hitl-new.hitl.washington.edu [128.95.73.60]) by burdell.cc.gatech.edu (8.9.1/8.9.1) with ESMTP id UAA10574; Fri, 11 Jun 1999 20:36:34 -0400 (EDT) Received: from mail1.microsoft.com (mail1.microsoft.com [131.107.3.125]) by asbestos.hitl.washington.edu (8.9.3/8.9.3) with SMTP id RAA00524 for <3d-ui@hitl.washington.edu>; Fri, 11 Jun 1999 17:35:03 -0700 (PDT) Received: from 157.54.9.125 by mail1.microsoft.com (InterScan E-Mail VirusWall NT); Fri, 11 Jun 1999 17:34:06 -0700 (Pacific Daylight Time) Received: by INET-IMC-01 with Internet Mail Service (5.5.2524.0) id ; Fri, 11 Jun 1999 17:34:05 -0700 Message-ID: <4FD6422BE942D111908D00805F3158DF0D954465@RED-MSG-52> From: Matt Conway To: "'zhai@almaden.ibm.com'" Cc: 3d-ui@hitl.washington.edu Subject: RE: Comments on Eye Tracking Technologies Date: Fri, 11 Jun 1999 17:33:58 -0700 MIME-Version: 1.0 X-Mailer: Internet Mail Service (5.5.2524.0) Content-Type: text/plain; charset="windows-1252" Status: RO Shumin, Thanks for the heads-up about ASL. Basically, what I'm looking for is a tracker I can use to know how people's eyes are moving when they are reading a book. If I could detect saccades and fixations with timestamps, that would probably be good enough. It might be the case that eye trackers aren't at all the thing to use, that I could get what I want out of electrodes measuring muscle contractions. any thoughts? -----Original Message----- From: zhai@almaden.ibm.com [mailto:zhai@almaden.ibm.com] Sent: Friday, June 11, 1999 11:55 AM To: Matt Conway Cc: 3d-ui@hitl.washington.edu Subject: Comments on Eye Tracking Technologies Matt, Eye tracking has become increasingly popular in recent years, both as a UI analysis tool and as an interaction technology. So I think it is worthwhile to share our experience with the group. We did market research on eye-tracking technologies about two years ago. In the end, we choose ASL, because it seemed to be the largest vendor and it promised high percentage of users who can be reliably tracked. It also promised a cubic foot of head movement. We were very disappointed. First, it could not easily track me and many of my colleagues. It may work better if you do a lot of tweaking (threshold, lighting, camera position, screen brightness etc etc) but the same adjustments may not work the next time you come back to the tracker. It does work reasonably well if you have "good" subjects: people with no glasses, with large and bright pupil etc. Younger people tend to be better subjects too. Second, the 1 cubic foot of head movement is simply not true, although there is a slow servo on the camera. If you want reliable data, the subject has to stay steady. Having said that, I am not suggesting ASL is not among the best. I do not believe any one has a truly satisfactory eye-tracker yet. We eventually developed our own eye-tracker. The key idea that made our eye-tracker different from the commercial ones is that we used a dual infra red illumination scheme, so both the dark pupil and bright pupil (like red-eye in photos) are detected. It worked a lot better (still far from ideal). I hope the commercial eye-tracking companies will follow the idea soon ( In fact we re-invented the idea, it has been around, but not very well known). For a brief description of the IBM Almaden eye tracker, check Zhai, S. Morimoto, C., Ihde, S. "Manual And Gaze Input Cascaded (MAGIC) Pointing", Proc. CHI'99. Shumin ___________________________________________ Shumin Zhai, IBM Almaden Research Center, Tel: (408)927-1112, Fax (408)927-4366, http://www.almaden.ibm.com/cs/people/zhai