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Eye tracking is becoming a central input modality for extended-reality and smart-glasses systems. In virtual reality, gaze can support foveated rendering, avatar eye contact, and hands-free selection. On AR or everyday smart glasses, gaze has an additional role: it tells what the wearer is paying attention to in the surrounding world. When a user asks, ''What is this?'', the answer depends on whether the user is looking at a sign, a warning light, a product label, or a person in the scene. This context is especially important for on-device AI agents. A front-facing camera can capture the scene, but it does not by itself reveal the user's attention. Gaze can disambiguate speech, focus perception, and enable low-effort interaction without asking the wearer to point or touch a controller. The challenge is that smart glasses have a much tighter hardware budget than headsets. Sensors must be small, low power, robust to outdoor conditions, and unobtrusive enough to fit into eyewear.
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Ma et al. (2026) studied this question.
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