Alexander Rohlfing

Towards Gaze Gesture Experiments and Comparative Eye-Tracker Studies

The interest in new input modalities such as eye-tracking is growing. It’s not only driven by the industry which strives for example to create more immersive games or find a supporting technology for driver assistance systems but also for assistive systems to support the everyday life of people who cannot use traditional input modalities due to motor impairments. However, to use this input technology in a efficient and useful way there is much fundamental research to be done first. The usage of eye-tracking as an appropriate input requires to handle several issues which lie in the technology basis of the eye-trackers and in the human anatomy itself. Therefore it is essential to understand how gaze interaction techniques can be used, implemented and integrated into interactive systems.

The subject of this thesis is related to the implementation of an editor named GesturEd for an existing software framework initially designed by Martin Stephen van Tonder [Ton09], realized by [Bo ̈v14] and extended with an Experiment Builder by Birte Heine- mann in [Hei16]. Its features include the easy and quick creation of gaze gestures and its properties and the integration into the existing software environment. This way the user is empowered to use the software framework for the design and usage of gaze- based gestures in experiments. Furthermore this work should contribute the basis to perform comparative eye-tracker studies. For this purpose an additional extension is implemented and integrated into the software framework to provide an interface to the RED250 eye-tracker by Sensomotoric Instruments(SMI).