Attentive User Interfaces for DWARF
Student: Vinko Novak
Supervisor: Dipl.Inf. Christian Sandor
Professor: Prof. Gudrun Klinker
Submission date: 14.06.2004
Abstract
This diploma thesis covers the problems associated with the tracking of users’ attention during
human computer interaction(HCI), and how the attention can be used to improve the
HCI. A system to track, visualize and use attention as an input has been implemented. From
the attention focus it can be understood what people do, how they interact with the system
and which objects are currently of interest for them. We are going to use this information to
simplify the human computer interaction.
Nowadays, every user is surrounded by many devices (i.e. PC, cell phones, PDA’s, note
book etc.), each of them requesting immediate user’s attention. This requests are often interfering
with the current user’s task and result in an unwished interruption. The main problem
lies in the user interfaces for these devices because they use the old WIMP (windows, icons,
menus, pointers) paradigm, which has been developed 20 years ago. At that time, one user
was interacting with at most one computer, and WIMP developers assumed, that the whole
user’s attention is set to this one device. Presently, such behavior is often fatal, because users
get bombarded by requests for attention from different devices. We use Attentive User Interfaces
(AUI) to solve this problem by augmenting the devices with the capability to sense
and reason about users’ attention.
The viewing direction of humans tells a lot about their attention focus. This includes
which person, device or task the user is paying attention to, the importance of that task, and
how eyes are used to open communicational channels in interpersonal communications. Researches
in the cognitive psychology showed that there is a close relation between the eye
direction and attention focus. Therefore, we will use eye tracking in combination with headtracking
to compute eye direction in the 3D space and use it as the input for AUI.
Our main goal is to develop a working application to demonstrate the advantages of the
AUI versus the WIMP paradigm.
Work products
See
ProjectCar for more information.