Intelligent Gaze-Added Interfaces

We discuss a novel type of interface, the intelligent gazeadded interface, and describe the design and evaluation of a sample gaze-added operating-system interface. Gaze-added interfaces, like current gaze-based systems, allow users to execute commands using their eyes. However, while most gaze-based systems replace the functionality of other inputs with that of gaze, gaze-added interfaces simply add gaze functionality that the user can employ if and when desired. Intelligent gaze-added interfaces utilize a probabilistic algorithm and user model to interpret gaze focus and alleviate typical problems with eye-tracking data. We extended a standard WIMP operating-system interface into a new interface, IGO, that incorporates intelligent gazeadded input. In a user study, we found that users quickly adapted to the new interface and utilized gaze effectively both alone and with other inputs.