Efficient eye pointing with a fisheye lens

This paper evaluates refinements to existing eye pointing techniques involving a fisheye lens. We use a fisheye lens and a video-based eye tracker to locally magnify the display at the point of the user’s gaze. Our gaze-contingent fisheye facilitates eye pointing and selection of magnified (expanded) targets. Two novel interaction techniques are evaluated for managing the fisheye, both dependent on real-time analysis of the user’s eye movements. Unlike previous attempts at gaze-contingent fisheye control, our key innovation is to hide the fisheye during visual search, and morph the fisheye into view as soon as the user completes a saccadic eye movement and has begun fixating a target. This style of interaction allows the user to maintain an overview of the desktop during search while selectively zooming in on the foveal region of interest during selection. Comparison of these interaction styles with ones where the fisheye is continuously slaved to the user’s gaze (omnipresent) or is not used to affect target expansion (nonexistent) shows performance benefits in terms of speed and accuracy.