An approach for user identification for head-mounted displays

A head-mounted display (HMD) is a device, worn by a person, which has a display in front of one or both eyes. HMDs have applications in a variety of domains including gaming, virtual reality, and medicine. In this paper we present an approach that can identify a user, from among a group of users, by synchronously capturing their unconscious blinking and head-movements using integrated HMD sensors. We ask each user of the HMD to view a series of rapidly changing images of numbers and letters on the HMD display. Simultaneously, their blinks and head-movements are captured using infrared, accelerometer, and gyroscope sensors. Analysis of our approach using blink and head-movement data collected from 20 individuals demonstrates the feasibility of our approach with an accuracy of ~94%.