Abstract
The use of eye tracking (ET) and head tracking (HT) in head-mounted displays allows for the study of a subject’s attention in virtual reality environments, expanding the possibility to develop experiments in areas such as health or consumer behavior research. ET is a more precise technique than HT, but many commercial devices do not include ET systems. One way to study visual attention is to segment the space in areas of interest (AoI). However, the ET and HT responses could be similar depending on the size of the studied area in the virtual environment. Therefore, understanding the differences between ET and HT based on AoI size is critical in order to enable the use of HT to assess human attention. The purpose of this study was to perform a comparison between ET and HT technologies through the study of multiple sets of AoI in an immersive virtual environment. To do that, statistical techniques were developed with the objective of measuring the differences between the two technologies. This study found that with HT, an accuracy of 75.37% was obtained when the horizontal and vertical angular size of the AoIs was 25°. Moreover, the results suggest that horizontal movements of the head are much more similar to eye movements than vertical movements. Finally, this work presents a guide for future researchers to measure the precision of HT against ET, considering the dimensions of the AoI defined in a virtual scenario.
This is a preview of subscription content, log in via an institution to check access.
Access this chapter
Tax calculation will be finalised at checkout
Purchases are for personal use only
References
Riva, G., et al.: Affective interactions using virtual reality: the link between presence and emotions. Cyberpsychol. Behav. Impact Internet Multimedia Virtual Real. Behav. Soc. 10, 45–56 (2007)
Renaud, P., Joyal, C., Stoleru, S., Goyette, M., Weiskopf, N., Birbaumer, N.: Real-time functional magnetic imaging-braincomputer interface and virtual reality. Promis. Tools Treat. Pedophilia. Prog. Brain Res. 192(2), 63–72 (2011)
Henderson, J., Hollingworth, A.: High-level scene perception. Annu. Rev. Psychol. 50, 243–271 (1999)
Lutz, O., et al.: Application of head-mounted devices with eye-tracking in virtual reality therapy. Curr. Dir. Biomed. Eng. 3(1), 53–56 (2017)
Al-Rahayfeh, A., Faezipour, M.: Eye tracking and head movement detection: a state-of-art survey. IEEE J. Transl. Eng. Health Med. 1, 2100212 (2013)
Bekele, E., Zheng, Z., Swanson, A., Crittendon, J., Warren, Z., Sarkar, N.: Understanding how adolescents with autism respond to facial expressions in virtual reality environments. IEEE Trans. Vis. Comput. Graph. 19(4), 711–720 (2013)
Deans, P., O’Laughlin, L., Brubaker, B., Gay, N., Krug, D.: Use of eye movement tracking in the differential diagnosis of attention deficit hyperactivity disorder (ADHD) and reading disability. Psychology 1, 238–246 (2010)
Duchowski, A.T., Medlin, E., Gramopadhye, A., Melloy, B., Nair, S. Binocular eye tracking in VR for visual inspection training. In: Proceedings of the ACM Symposium on Virtual Reality Software and Technology, pp. 1–8. Association for Computing Machinery, New York (2001)
Ahlstrom, C., Victor, T., Wege, C., Steinmetz, E.: Processing of eye/head-tracking data in large-scale naturalistic driving data sets. IEEE Trans. Intell. Transp. Syst. 13(2), 553–564 (2012)
Zito, G.A., Cazzoli, D., Scheffler, L.: Street crossing behavior in younger and older pedestrians: an eye- and head-tracking study. BMC Geriatr. 15, 176 (2015)
Zapała, D., Balaj, B.: Eye tracking and head tracking – the two approaches in assistive technologies (2012)
Pfeil, K., Taranta, E.M., Kulshreshth, A., Wisniewski, P., LaViola, J.J.: A comparison of eye-head coordination between virtual and physical realities. In: Proceedings of the 15th ACM Symposium on Applied Perception, no. 18, pp. 1–7. Association for Computing Machinery, New York (2018)
Qian, Y.Y., Teather, R.: The eyes don’t have it: an empirical comparison of head-based and eye-based selection in virtual reality. In: Proceedings of the 5th Symposium on Spatial User Interaction, pp. 91–98. Association for Computing Machinery, New York (2017)
Acknowledgment
This work was supported by the European Commission (Project RHUMBO H2020-MSCA-ITN-2018-813234), by the Generalitat Valenciana funded project “Rebrand,” grant number PROMETEU/2019/105, and by the European Regional Development Fund program of the Valencian Community 2014–2020 project “Interfaces de realidad mixta aplicada a salud y toma de decisiones,” grant number IDIFEDER/2018/029.
Author information
Authors and Affiliations
Corresponding author
Editor information
Editors and Affiliations
Rights and permissions
Copyright information
© 2021 Springer Nature Switzerland AG
About this paper
Cite this paper
Llanes-Jurado, J., Marín-Morales, J., Moghaddasi, M., Khatri, J., Guixeres, J., Alcañiz, M. (2021). Comparing Eye Tracking and Head Tracking During a Visual Attention Task in Immersive Virtual Reality. In: Kurosu, M. (eds) Human-Computer Interaction. Interaction Techniques and Novel Applications. HCII 2021. Lecture Notes in Computer Science(), vol 12763. Springer, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-78465-2_3
Download citation
DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-78465-2_3
Published:
Publisher Name: Springer, Cham
Print ISBN: 978-3-030-78464-5
Online ISBN: 978-3-030-78465-2
eBook Packages: Computer ScienceComputer Science (R0)