Two-Step Gaze Guidance

ABSTRACT One challenge of providing guidance for search tasks consists in guiding the user’s visual attention to certain objects in a potentially large search space. Previous work has tried to guide the user’s attention by providing visual, audio, or haptic cues. The state-of-the-art methods either provide hints pointing towards the approximate direction of the target location for a fast but less accurate search or require the user to perform a fine-grained search from the beginning for a precise yet less efficient search. To combine the advantage of both methods, we propose an interaction concept called Two-Step Gaze Guidance. The first-step guidance focuses on quick guidance toward the approximate direction, and the second-step guidance focuses on fine-grained guidance toward the exact location of the target. A between-subject study (N = 69) with five conditions was carried out to compare the two-step gaze guidance method with the single-step gaze guidance method. Results revealed that the proposed method outperformed the single-step gaze guidance method. More precisely, the introduction of Two-Step Gaze Guidance slightly improves the searching accuracy, and the use of spatial audio as the first-step guidance significantly helps in enhancing the searching efficiency. Our results also indicated several design suggestions for designing gaze guidance methods.