Gaze Prediction in Virtual Reality Without Eye Tracking Using Visual and Head Motion Cues

TL;DR

This paper introduces a gaze prediction method for VR that combines head motion and visual cues, enabling accurate anticipation of user gaze without eye tracking, thus improving latency and interaction quality.

Contribution

It presents a novel framework integrating visual saliency and head motion for gaze prediction, evaluated with lightweight models on real VR hardware.

Findings

Outperforms baseline methods like Center-of-HMD and Mean Gaze

Effective in reducing perceptual lag in VR environments

Validated on the EHTask dataset and commercial VR hardware

Abstract

Gaze prediction plays a critical role in Virtual Reality (VR) applications by reducing sensor-induced latency and enabling computationally demanding techniques such as foveated rendering, which rely on anticipating user attention. However, direct eye tracking is often unavailable due to hardware limitations or privacy concerns. To address this, we present a novel gaze prediction framework that combines Head-Mounted Display (HMD) motion signals with visual saliency cues derived from video frames. Our method employs UniSal, a lightweight saliency encoder, to extract visual features, which are then fused with HMD motion data and processed through a time-series prediction module. We evaluate two lightweight architectures, TSMixer and LSTM, for forecasting future gaze directions. Experiments on the EHTask dataset, along with deployment on commercial VR hardware, show that our approach consistently outperforms baselines such as Center-of-HMD and Mean Gaze. These results demonstrate the effectiveness of predictive gaze modeling in reducing perceptual lag and enhancing natural interaction in VR environments where direct eye tracking is constrained.