To Show or Hide - Investigating the Effect of Cursor Visibility in Gaze-controlled Interfaces

In a gaze-controlled interface, the cursor is mapped to gaze points, making the cursor visible and tracked throughout the screen. We propose a novel system where we disable the visibility of the cursor movement during the pointing task and enable selection using a separate mechanical switch. As the gaze-tracker already does the pointing task, we were not required to visualize the cursor, which might distract the user from pointing at the intended target due to offsets by the eye-gaze tracker. In this study, we compared the performance of the without-cursor tracking interface and the with-cursor tracking interface. We found that the accuracy measures, average selection time, and system usability were significantly better for the without-cursor tracking interface than the with-cursor tracking interface. We are planning to extend the study to elderly users and people with motor impairments, tics, and tremors for the performance of the without-cursor tracking interface.