Universal eye-tracking based text cursor warping.

In this paper we present an approach to build an eye-tracking based text cursor placement system. When triggered, the system employs a computer vision based analysis of the screen's content around the current gaze position to find the most likely designated gaze target. Eventually it synthesizes a mouse event at that position, allowing for a rapid text cursor repositioning even in applications which do not support eye tracking explicitly. For our system we compared three different computer vision methods in a simulation run and evaluated the best candidate in two double blinded user studies. We used a total of 19 participants to assess the system's objective and perceived end user speed up. We can demonstrate that in terms of reposition time the OCR based method is superior to the other tested methods, it also beats common keyboard-mouse interaction for some users. We conclude that while the tool was almost universally preferred subjectively over keyboard-mouse interaction, the highest speed can be achieved by using the right amount of eye tracking.