Comparison Of Three Implementations Of Headturn: A Multimodal Interaction Technique With Gaze And Head Turns

The best way to construct user interfaces for smart glasses is not yet known. We investigated the use of eye tracking in this context in two experiments. The eye and head movements were combined so that one can select the object to interact by looking at it and then change a setting in that object by turning the head horizontally. We compared three different techniques for mapping the head turn to scrolling a list of numbers with and without haptic feedback. We found that the haptic feedback had no noticeable effect in objective metrics, but it sometimes improved user experience. Direct mapping of head orientation to list position is fast and easy to understand, but the signal-to-noise ratio of eye and head position measurement limits the possible range. The technique with constant rate of change after crossing the head angle threshold was simple and functional, but slow when the rate of change is adjusted to suit beginners. Finally the rate of change dependent on the head angle tends to lead to fairly long task completion times, although in theory it offers a good combination of speed and accuracy.