Gaze-Aware Systems and Attentive Applications

In this chapter, we examine systems that use the current focus of a person’s visual attention to make the system easier to use, less effortful and, hopefully, more efficient. If the system can work out which object the person is interested in, or is likely to interact with next, then the need for the person to deliberately point at, or otherwise identify that object to the system can be removed. This approach can be applied to interaction with real-world objects and people as well as to objects presented on a display close to the system user. We examine just what we can infer about a person’s focus of visual attention, and their intention to do something from studying their eye movements, and what, if anything, the system should do about it. A detailed example of an attentive system is presented where the system estimates the difficulty a reader has understanding individual words when reading in a foreign language, and displays a translation automatically if it thinks it is needed.