Towards Everyday Virtual Reality through Eye Tracking

TL;DR

This paper discusses the integration of eye tracking technology into virtual reality to enable everyday use, emphasizing understanding attention, privacy concerns, and accessibility for broader adoption.

Contribution

It presents three main research contributions addressing attention models, privacy preservation, and protocols for accessible everyday virtual reality with eye tracking.

Findings

Enhanced understanding of attention and cognition in VR scenarios

Proposed privacy-preserving methods for eye tracking data

Development of protocols for accessible and widespread VR use

Abstract

With developments in computer graphics, hardware technology, perception engineering, and human-computer interaction, virtual reality and virtual environments are becoming more integrated into our daily lives. Head-mounted displays, however, are still not used as frequently as other mobile devices such as smart phones and watches. With increased usage of this technology and the acclimation of humans to virtual application scenarios, it is possible that in the near future an everyday virtual reality paradigm will be realized. When considering the marriage of everyday virtual reality and head-mounted displays, eye tracking is an emerging technology that helps to assess human behaviors in a real time and non-intrusive way. Still, multiple aspects need to be researched before these technologies become widely available in daily life. Firstly, attention and cognition models in everyday scenarios should be thoroughly understood. Secondly, as eyes are related to visual biometrics, privacy preserving methodologies are necessary. Lastly, instead of studies or applications utilizing limited human participants with relatively homogeneous characteristics, protocols and use-cases for making such technology more accessible should be essential. In this work, taking the aforementioned points into account, a significant scientific push towards everyday virtual reality has been completed with three main research contributions.