Four of the Inc people participated in the CHI 08 conference in Florence, Italy, last week. Anker Helms Jørgensen organized a Special Interest Group on the history of User Interfaces together with Brad Meyers, CMU. The session was well attended with more than 20 people participating and Anker has now started a blog to continue the discussion.
Javier San Agustin and John Paulin Hansen presented their work-in-progress, comparing mouse and gaze selection. They found a combination of gaze and EMG clicking to be faster than mouse pointing and clicking. The research is important for the development of more efficient interaction with e.g. games and with communication systems for disabled people. This work is done in collaboration with Julio Mateo at Wright State University and an abstract can be found here.
Sune Alstrup participated in a workshop about evaluation of user experience in games, where he presented work on how to evaluate gamers’ experience by the use of eye tracking and retrospective think aloud.
The new 3D typing system, “Stargazer” developed by Henrik H. Jensen and the gaze interaction research group at IT University of Copenhagen was tested with great success at the open-house event “Culture Night” on October 12, 2007. All of the 35 visitors who tried it could use it after just one minute. We randomly assigned them to small PDA-size screens, we put noise disturbances on the tracker and no matter what – they wrote their names. Some of them were typing at a speed of more than 20 characters per minute. And the zooming speed can be increased a lot once you learn to master the layout and interaction. We are now including word predictions and expect that people may get to type more than 50 characters per minute with some training. Pan and zoom selections are well guided by gaze. Expect to see more in the near future!
Last week five people from ITU attended the third COGAIN Camp in Leicester, England. There was a conference on Monday with the theme “Gaze-based Creativity, Interacting with Games and On-line Communities”, and an exhibition on Tuesday where an award ceremony for the student competition on gaze creativity was held. ITU had the pleasure of being represented in both events.
Jakob Schantz, a master student at ITU, participated in the Creative Gaze student competition with his StrongEyes game, a 3D space arcade where the user controls a spaceship using only their gaze. The game was awarded the second prize, and reviewers praised its great potential of gaze control for both disabled and non-disabled users. Jakob got the opportunity of attending to the Camp and showing his game. Some eye tracking companies were interested in incorporating his game to their software packages, which might open up some job possibilities for Jakob in the near future. You can see a video of the ceremony and the exhibition here (originally uploaded by John Paulin Hansen).
On Monday Javier presented the paper that was written together with Jakob and John. In this paper we studied the performance of 6 input devices (mouse, joystick, touch screen, head tracker and 2 different eye trackers) in two common tasks in videogames, target selection (aim and shoot) and target tracking. During the Q&A’s the audience provided feedback on issues that could be further investigated in student projects and master theses.
Last week Arne Lykke Larsen gave a talk to students at the School of Social Work in Odense, Denmark. Arne is paralyzed because he has ALS/mnd and uses gaze interaction to type and control speech.
Arne is an associate professor in theoretical physics at University of Southern Denmark and gives lectures regularly. Normally, he uses the Brainfinger EMG switch and this was his very first public talk given with the use of gaze interaction. Arne has THE darkest sense of humor and for those of you who read danish I highly recommend to download his daily-life observations. One of the novels “33 Nej men jeg har læst bogen” gave us some good ideas to the GazeTalk system that Arne is helping us designing.
People from the INC group gave an invited talk and demonstration of gaze communication at the ALS/MND symposium, Yokohama, Dec. 2006. During the workshop, 400 Japanese communicationspecialists saw how gaze interaction has improved the quality of life for people with ALS, and they got a chance to try the latest Japanese version of GazeTalk, a communication system designed for gaze control. This Youtube video explains how gaze communication works.
