Application of Fitts' law to eye gaze interaction

ABSTRACT

An experiment is described comparing the performance of an eye tracker and a mouse in a simple pointing task. Subjects had to make rapid and accurate horizontal movements to targets that were vertical ribbons located at various distances from the cursor's starting position. The dwell-time protocol was used for the eye tracker to make selections. Movement times were shorter for the mouse than for the eye tracker. Fitts' Law model was shown to predict movement times using both interaction techniques equally well. The model is thus seen to be a potential contributor to design of modern multimodal human-computer interfaces.

REFERENCES

• 1: MacKenzie, I. S. Fitts' law as a research and design tool in human-computer interaction. Human-Computer Interaction 7, 1992, 91-139.
• 2: Linda E. Sibert , Robert J. K. Jacob, Evaluation of eye gaze interaction, Proceedings of the SIGCHI conference on Human factors in computing systems, p.281-288, April 01-06, 2000, The Hague, The Netherlands [doi>10.1145/332040.332445]
• 3: Colin Ware , Harutune H. Mikaelian, An evaluation of an eye tracker as a device for computer input2, Proceedings of the SIGCHI/GI conference on Human factors in computing systems and graphics interface, p.183-188, April 05-09, 1987, Toronto, Ontario, Canada

INDEX TERMS

Keywords:
Fitts' law, cursor control, eye tracking