The association between visual discomfort and the use of visual display units

This paper reports the results of a two-year survey of the visual problems associated with the use of visual display units (VDUs). The survey examined both discomfort levels and visual function, and asked whether there were differences in these measures between subjects who used a VDU in the completion of their tasks and controls who did not. In total, 202 subjects were examined. The main study examined four groups of which two, Data Preparation and Word Processing (WP) used a VDU in the completion of their tasks, while the other two, General Clerical and Typing (TY), did not. Subjective measures of visual discomfort and objective measures of visual function were taken at both the beginning and end of the day.

Two analyses were performed on the data; the first considered all four groups together, and the second directly compared the WP and TY groups—these two groups being considered well matched. The first analysis showed that statistically significant differences existed between the groups at the end of the day. However, differences were also shown between the groups at the beginning of the day, and when the measure 'change over the day' was used, no significant differences attributable to the VDU were found. The second analysis found no significant differences between the TY and WP groups, nor were any trends apparent.

A further study was done on ten subjects who alternated on a daily basis between using a word processor and a typewriter. No significant differences were found between the days using one and those using the other, confirming the above finding.

Whilst both optometric measures of visual function and reported visual discomfort did change over the day, we conclude we have no evidence lo support the idea that the VDU is in itself a causal factor of these changes to any greater extent than is the paper in a typewriter.     

Two-stage salient object identification and segmentation based on irregularity

Multimedia Tools and Applications - Saliency extraction is a technique inspired by the human approach in processing a selected portion of the visual information received. This feature in the human...     

Gaze interaction with virtual on-line communities: levelling the playing field for disabled users

This paper introduces the concept of enabling gaze-based interaction for users with high-level motor disabilities to control an avatar in a first-person perspective on-line community. An example community, Second Life, is introduced that could offer disabled users the same virtual freedom as any other user, and so allow disabled users to be able-bodied (should they wish) within the virtual world. A survey of the control demands for Second Life and a subsequent preliminary experiment show that gaze control has inherent problems particularly for locomotion and camera movement. These problems result in a lack of effective gaze control of Second Life, such that control is not practical and show that disabled users who interact using gaze will have difficulties in controlling Second Life (and similar environments). This suggests that these users could once again become disabled in the virtual world by the difficulties in effectively controlling their avatars, and their ‘disability privacy’, or the right to control an avatar as effectively as an able bodied user, and so appear virtually able bodied, will be compromised. Methods for overcoming these difficulties such as the use of gaze aware on-screen assistive tools could overcome these problems, but games manufacturers must design inclusively, so that disabled users may have the right to disability privacy in their Second (virtual) Lives.     

What were we all looking at? Identifying objects of collective visual attention

We aim to identify the salient objects in an image by applying a model of visual attention. We automate the process by predicting those objects in an image that are most likely to be the focus of someone's visual attention. Concretely, we first generate fixation maps from the eye tracking data, which express the ground truth of people's visual attention for each training image. Then, we extract the high-level features based on the bag-of-visual-words image representation as input attributes along with the fixation maps to train a support vector regression model. With this model, we can predict a new query image's saliency. Our experiments show that the model is capable of providing a good estimate for human visual attention in test images sets with one salient object and multiple salient objects. In this way, we seek to reduce the redundant information within the scene, and thus provide a more accurate depiction of the scene.     

Shared Gaze in Collaborative Visual Search

ABSTRACT

Collaboration improves efficiency, avoids duplication of efforts, improves goal-awareness, and makes working generally more pleasurable. While collaboration is desirable, it introduces additional costs because of the required coordination. In this article, we study how visual search is affected by gaze-sharing collaboration. There is evidence that pairs of visual searchers using gaze-only sharing are more efficient than single searchers. We extend this result by investigating if groups of three searchers are more efficient, and if and how the groups of searchers develop their search strategy. We conducted an experiment to understand how the collaboration develops when groups of one to three participants perform a visual search task by collaborating with shared gaze. The task was to state if the target was present among distractors. Our results show that users are able to develop an efficient search and division-of-labor strategy when the only collaboration method is gaze-sharing.     

Introducing COGAIN: communication by gaze interaction

This paper introduces the work of the COGAIN “communication by gaze interaction” European Network of Excellence that is working toward giving people with profound disabilities the opportunity to communicate and control their environment by eye gaze control. It shows the need for developing eye gaze based communication systems, and illustrates the effectiveness of newly developed COGAIN eye gaze control systems with a series of case studies, each showing differing aspects of the benefits offered by gaze control. Finally, the paper puts forward a strong case for users, professionals and researchers to collaborate towards developing gaze based communication systems to enable and empower people with disabilities.