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A Fitts Law comparison of eye tracking and manual input in the selection of visual targets

Published: 20 October 2008 Publication History

Abstract

We present a Fitts' Law evaluation of a number of eye tracking and manual input devices in the selection of large visual targets. We compared performance of two eye tracking techniques, manual click and dwell time click, with that of mouse and stylus. Results show eye tracking with manual click outperformed the mouse by 16%, with dwell time click 46% faster. However, eye tracking conditions suffered a high error rate of 11.7% for manual click and 43% for dwell time click conditions. After Welford correction eye tracking still appears to outperform manual input, with IPs of 13.8 bits/s for dwell time click, and 10.9 bits/s for manual click. Eye tracking with manual click provides the best tradeoff between speed and accuracy, and was preferred by 50% of participants. Mouse and stylus had IPs of 4.7 and 4.2 respectively. However, their low error rate of 5% makes these techniques more suitable for refined target selection.

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    cover image ACM Conferences
    ICMI '08: Proceedings of the 10th international conference on Multimodal interfaces
    October 2008
    322 pages
    ISBN:9781605581989
    DOI:10.1145/1452392
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    Published: 20 October 2008

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    Author Tags

    1. Fitts Law
    2. attentive user interfaces.
    3. eye tracking
    4. focus selection
    5. input devices

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    ICMI '08: INTERNATIONAL CONFERENCE ON MULTIMODAL INTERFACES
    October 20 - 22, 2008
    Crete, Chania, Greece

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    • (2024)Selection Performance and Reliability of Eye and Head Gaze Tracking Under Varying Light Conditions2024 IEEE Conference Virtual Reality and 3D User Interfaces (VR)10.1109/VR58804.2024.00075(546-556)Online publication date: 16-Mar-2024
    • (2024)Evaluating Target Expansion for Eye Pointing TasksInteracting with Computers10.1093/iwc/iwae00436:4(209-223)Online publication date: 27-Feb-2024
    • (2024)The impact of visual and motor space size on gaze-based target selectionAustralian Journal of Psychology10.1080/00049530.2024.230938476:1Online publication date: 5-Feb-2024
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