Interacting with eye movements in virtual environments

Eye movement-based interaction offers the potential of easy, natural, and fast ways of interacting in virtual environments. However, there is little empirical evidence about the advantages or disadvantages of this approach. We developed a new interaction technique for eye movement interaction in a virtual environment and compared it to more conventional 3-D pointing. We conducted an experiment to compare performance of the two interaction types and to assess their impacts on spatial memory of subjects and to explore subjects' satisfaction with the two types of interactions. We found that the eye movement-based interaction was faster than pointing, especially for distant objects. However, subjects' ability to recall spatial information was weaker in the eye condition than the pointing one. Subjects reported equal satisfaction with both types of interactions, despite the technology limitations of current eye tracking equipment.