Skip to main content

Accuracy Assessment of ARKit 2 Based Gaze Estimation

  • Conference paper
  • First Online:
Human-Computer Interaction. Design and User Experience (HCII 2020)

Abstract

With the growing amount of mobile application usage, assuring a high quality of experience became more and more important. Besides traditional subjective methods to test and prototype new developments, eye tracking is a prominent tool to assess quality and UX of a software product. Although portable eye trackers exist, the technology is still mostly associated with expensive laboratory equipment. To change that and to run quick and cheap eye-tracking studies in the field, attempts have been made to turn everyday hardware like smartphone cameras and webcams into eye trackers. This study explores the possibility of using a standard library of iOS to tackle the vast technical complexity usually coming with such approaches. The accuracy of an eye-tracking system purely based on the ARKit APIs of iOS is evaluated in two user studies (N = 9 & N = 8). The results indicate that an ARKit based gaze tracker provides comparable performance in terms of accuracy (\(3.18^\circ \), or 1.44 cm on screen), while at the same time, it uses far fewer hardware resources and provides a higher sample-rate than any other smartphone eye tracker. Especially the easy to use API is the main advantage over the technical complex systems which rely on their own image analysis for gaze estimation. Privacy implications are discussed.

This is a preview of subscription content, log in via an institution to check access.

Access this chapter

Chapter
USD 29.95
Price excludes VAT (USA)
  • Available as PDF
  • Read on any device
  • Instant download
  • Own it forever
eBook
USD 84.99
Price excludes VAT (USA)
  • Available as EPUB and PDF
  • Read on any device
  • Instant download
  • Own it forever
Softcover Book
USD 109.99
Price excludes VAT (USA)
  • Compact, lightweight edition
  • Dispatched in 3 to 5 business days
  • Free shipping worldwide - see info

Tax calculation will be finalised at checkout

Purchases are for personal use only

Institutional subscriptions

References

  1. Abbaszadegan, M., Yaghoubi, S., MacKenzie, I.S.: TrackMaze: a comparison of head-tracking, eye-tracking, and tilt as input methods for mobile games. In: Kurosu, M. (ed.) HCI 2018. LNCS, vol. 10903, pp. 393–405. Springer, Cham (2018). https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-91250-9_31

    Chapter  Google Scholar 

  2. Apple: Arkit 2 arfaceanchor - information about the pose, topology, and expression of a face detected in a face-tracking AR session (2018). https://developer.apple.com/documentation/arkit/arfaceanchor

  3. Bates, R., Istance, H.O.: Why are eye mice unpopular? a detailed comparison of head and eye controlled assistive technology pointing devices. Univers. Inf. Soc. 2(3), 280–290 (2003)

    Article  Google Scholar 

  4. Brousseau, B., Rose, J., Eizenman, M.: Hybrid eye-tracking on a smartphone with cnn feature extraction and an infrared 3D model. Sensors 20(2), 543 (2020)

    Article  Google Scholar 

  5. Carl, J., Gellman, R.: Human smooth pursuit: stimulus-dependent responses. J. Neurophysiol. 57(5), 1446–1463 (1987)

    Article  Google Scholar 

  6. Cicek, M., Xie, J., Wang, Q., Piramuthu, R.: Mobile head tracking for ecommerce and beyond. arXiv preprint arXiv:1812.07143 (2018)

  7. Coble, K.: Aitoolbox. a toolbox of AI modules written in swift: Graphs/trees, support vector machines, neural networks, PCA, k-means, genetic algorithms (2017). https://github.com/KevinCoble/AIToolbox

  8. Dodge, R.: Five types of eye movement in the horizontal meridian plane of the field of regard. Am. J. Physiol. Legacy Content 8(4), 307–329 (1903)

    Article  Google Scholar 

  9. Duchowski, A.T.: Eye Tracking Methodology. Theory and Practice. Springer, Cham (2017). https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-57883-5

    Book  MATH  Google Scholar 

  10. Harrell Jr, F.E., Dupont, C., et al.: HMISC: Harrell miscellaneous. R package version 4.0-3. Online publication (2017)

    Google Scholar 

  11. Hawkeye Labs, I.: Hawkeye access - browse any website, hands-free, all through eye movements(2018). https://apps.apple.com/de/app/hawkeye-access/id1439231627

  12. Hawkeye Labs, I.: Hawkeye - user testing. eye tracking tests on an iphone or ipad, no extra hardware required (2019). https://www.usehawkeye.com/

  13. Hoppe, S., Loetscher, T., Morey, S.A., Bulling, A.: Eye movements during everyday behavior predict personality traits. Front. Hum. Neurosci. 12, 105 (2018)

    Article  Google Scholar 

  14. Hsu, C.L., Chen, Y.C., Yang, T.N., Lin, W.K.: Do website features matter in an online gamification context? focusing on the mediating roles of user experience and attitude. Telematics Inform. 34(4), 196–205 (2017)

    Article  Google Scholar 

  15. Huang, M.X., Li, J., Ngai, G., Leong, H.V.: Screenglint: practical, in-situ gaze estimation on smartphones. In: Proceedings of the 2017 CHI Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems, pp. 2546–2557. ACM (2017)

    Google Scholar 

  16. Khamis, M., Alt, F., Bulling, A.: The past, present, and future of gaze-enabled handheld mobile devices: survey and lessons learned. In: Proceedings of the 20th International Conference on Human-Computer Interaction with Mobile Devices and Services, pp. 1–17 (2018)

    Google Scholar 

  17. Krafka, K., et al.: Eye tracking for everyone. In: Proceedings of the IEEE Conference on Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition, pp. 2176–2184 (2016)

    Google Scholar 

  18. Kytö, M., Ens, B., Piumsomboon, T., Lee, G.A., Billinghurst, M.: Pinpointing: precise head-and eye-based target selection for augmented reality. In: Proceedings of the 2018 CHI Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems, pp. 1–14 (2018)

    Google Scholar 

  19. Landwehr, N., Arzt, S., Scheffer, T., Kliegl, R.: A model of individual differences in gaze control during reading. In: Proceedings of the 2014 Conference on Empirical Methods in Natural Language Processing (EMNLP), pp. 1810–1815 (2014)

    Google Scholar 

  20. Makowski, S., Jäger, L.A., Abdelwahab, A., Landwehr, N., Scheffer, T.: A discriminative model for identifying readers and assessing text comprehension from eye movements. In: Berlingerio, M., Bonchi, F., Gärtner, T., Hurley, N., Ifrim, G. (eds.) ECML PKDD 2018. LNCS (LNAI), vol. 11051, pp. 209–225. Springer, Cham (2019). https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-10925-7_13

    Chapter  Google Scholar 

  21. Papoutsaki, A., Laskey, J., Huang, J.: Searchgazer: webcam eye tracking for remote studies of web search. In: Proceedings of the 2017 Conference on Conference Human Information Interaction and Retrieval, pp. 17–26. ACM (2017)

    Google Scholar 

  22. Papoutsaki, A., Sangkloy, P., Laskey, J., Daskalova, N., Huang, J., Hays, J.: Webgazer: scalable webcam eye tracking using user interactions. In: Proceedings of the Twenty-Fifth International Joint Conference on Artificial Intelligence-IJCAI 2016 (2016)

    Google Scholar 

  23. Robinson, D.A.: The mechanics of human smooth pursuit eye movement. J. Physiol. 180(3), 569–591 (1965)

    Article  Google Scholar 

  24. StatCounter: Mobile and tablet internet usage exceeds desktop for first time worldwide. (2016). http://gs.statcounter.com/press/mobile-and-tablet-internet-usage-exceeds-desktop-for-first-time-worldwide

  25. Xu, P., Ehinger, K.A., Zhang, Y., Finkelstein, A., Kulkarni, S.R., Xiao, J.: Turkergaze: Crowdsourcing saliency with webcam based eye tracking. arXiv preprint arXiv:1504.06755 (2015)

Download references

Acknowledgment

We appreciate the help of our great team: Danish Ali, Martin Burghart, Tanja Kojic, Luis Meier, Lan Thao Nguyen, Kerstin Pieper, Andres Pinilla, and Sonia Sobol.

Author information

Authors and Affiliations

Authors

Corresponding author

Correspondence to Robert Greinacher .

Editor information

Editors and Affiliations

Rights and permissions

Reprints and permissions

Copyright information

© 2020 Springer Nature Switzerland AG

About this paper

Check for updates. Verify currency and authenticity via CrossMark

Cite this paper

Greinacher, R., Voigt-Antons, JN. (2020). Accuracy Assessment of ARKit 2 Based Gaze Estimation. In: Kurosu, M. (eds) Human-Computer Interaction. Design and User Experience. HCII 2020. Lecture Notes in Computer Science(), vol 12181. Springer, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-49059-1_32

Download citation

  • DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-49059-1_32

  • Published:

  • Publisher Name: Springer, Cham

  • Print ISBN: 978-3-030-49058-4

  • Online ISBN: 978-3-030-49059-1

  • eBook Packages: Computer ScienceComputer Science (R0)

Publish with us

Policies and ethics