Showing posts with label gazetalk. Show all posts
Showing posts with label gazetalk. Show all posts

Monday, November 23, 2009

ITU GazeTracker in the wild

Came across these two Youtube videos from students out there using the ITU GazeTracker in their HCI projects. By now the software has been downloaded 3000 times and the forum has seen close to three hundred posts. It's been a good start, better yet, a new version is in the makings. It offers a complete network API for third party applications, improved tracking performance, better camera control and a number of bugfixes (thanks for your feedback). It will be released when it's ready.







Thanks for posting the videos!

Monday, June 29, 2009

Video from COGAIN2009

John Paulin Hansen has posted a video showing some highlights from the annual COGAIN conference. It demonstrates three available gaze interaction solutions, the COGAIN GazeTalk interface, Tobii Technologies MyTobii and Alea Technologies IG-30. These interfaces relies on dwell-activated on-screen keyboards ( i.e. same procedure as last year).


Wednesday, May 13, 2009

Hi –fi eyetracking with a lo-fi eyetracker: An experimental usability study of an eyetracker built from a standard web camara (Barret, M., 2009)

Marie Barret, a masters student at the ITU Copenhagen have now finished her thesis. It evaluates eye typing performance using the ITU Gaze Tracker (low-cost web cam eye tracker) in the Stargazer and GazeTalk interfaces. The thesis in written in Danish (113 pages) but I took the freedom of translating two charts from the thesis found below. The results will be presented in English at the COGAIN 2009 conference, May 26th (session three, track one at 1:50PM) For now I quote the abstract:

"Innovation has facilitated sufficient mainstream technology to build eyetrackers from off-the-shelf-components. Prices for standard eyetrackers start at around € 4000. This thesis describes an experimental usabilty study of gazetyping with a new input device built from a standard web camera without hardware modifications. Cost: € 20. Mainstreaming of assistive technologies holds potential for faster innovation, better service, lower prices and increased accessibility. Off-the-shelf-eyetrackers must be usability competitive to standard eyetrackers in order to be adopted, as eyetracking - even with expensive hardware - presents usability issues. Usability is defined as effectiveness, efficiency and user satisfaction (ISO 9242-11, 1998).

Results from the 2 * 2 factors experiment significantly indicate how the new input device can reach the usability standards of expensive eyetrackers. This study demonstrates that the off-the-shelf-eyetracker can achieve efficiency similar to an expensive eyetracker with no significant effect from any of the tested factors. All four factors have significant impact on effectiveness. A factor that can eliminate the effectiveness difference between the standard hardware and an expensive eyetracker is identified. Another factor can additionally improve effectiveness.

Two gazetyping systems specifically designed for noisy conditions e.g. due to bad calibration and jolting are tested. StarGazer uses a zooming interface and GazeTalk uses large buttons in a static graphic user interface. GazeTalk is significantly more effective than StarGazer. The large onscreen buttons and static interface of GazeTalk with dwell time activation absorb the noise from the input device and typing speeds obtained are comparable to prior research with a regular eyetracker. Clickactivation has for years (Ware & Mikaelian 1987) proved to improve efficiency of gazebased interaction. This experiment demonstrates that this result significantly applies to off-the-shelf eyetrackers as well. The input device relies on the user to compensate for off-set with head movements. The keyboards should support this task with a static graphic user interface." Download thesis as pdf (in Danish)

Wednesday, July 9, 2008

GazeTalk 5

The GazeTalk system is one of the most comprehensive open solutions for gaze interaction today. It has been developed with the disabled users in mind and supports a wide range of everyday tasks. It dramatically increases the quality of life for the disabled suffering from ALS or similar conditions. The following information is quoted from the COGAIN website.

Information about Gazetalk 5 eye communication system

GazeTalk is a predictive text entry system that has a restricted on-screen keyboard with ambiguous layout for severely disabled people. The main reason for using such a keyboard layout is that it enables the use of an eye tracker with a low spatial resolution (e.g., a web-camera based eye tracker).

The goal of the GazeTalk project is to develop an eye-tracking based AAC system that supports several languages, facilitates fast text entry, and is both sufficiently feature-complete to be deployed as the primary AAC tool for users, yet sufficiently flexible and technically advanced to be used for research purposes. The system is designed for several target languages, initially Danish, English, Italian, German and Japanese.

Main features

  • type-to-talk
  • writing
  • email
  • web – browser
  • Multimedia – player
  • PDF – reader
  • letter and word prediction, and word completion
  • speech output
  • can be operated by gaze, headtracking, mouse, joystick, or any other pointing device
  • supports step-scanning (new!)
  • supports users with low precision in their movements, or trackers with low accuracy
  • allows the user to use Dasher inside GazeTalk and to transfer the text written in Dasher back to GazeTalk

GazeTalk 5.0 has been designed and developed by the Eye Gaze Interaction Group at the IT University of Copenhagen and the IT-Lab at the Royal School of Library and Information Science, Copenhagen.


gazetalk v5 screen shot gazetalk v5, linked with Dasher - screen shot

more info Read more About Gazetalk or view GazeTalk manual PDF icon

Short manual on data recording in Gazetalk Short manual on data recording in GazeTalk PDF icon

GazeTalk Videos

more info Download Gazetalk