In this thesis, a visual 3-D eye gaze tracker is designed and implemented to tested via computer simulations and on an experimental setup. Proposed tracker is designed to examine human perception on autostereoscopic displays when the viewer is 3m away from such displays. Two different methods are proposed for calibrating personal parameters and gaze estimation, namely line of gaze (LoG) and line of sight (LoS) solutions. 2-D and 3-D estimation performances of the proposed system are observed both using computer simulations and the experimental setup. In terms of 2-D and 3-D performance criteria, LoS solution generates slightly better results compared to that of LoG on experimental setup and their performances are found to be comparable in simulations. 2-D estimation inaccuracy of the system is obtained as smaller than 0.5&deg / during simulations and approximately 1&deg / for the experimental setup. 3-D estimation inaccuracy of the system along x- and y-axis is obtained as smaller than 2&deg / during the simulations and the experiments. However, estimation accuracy along z-direction is significantly sensitive to pupil detection and head pose estimation errors. For typical error levels, 20cm inaccuracy along z-direction is observed during simulations, whereas this inaccuracy reaches 80cm in the experimental setup.

Aim: The aim of the thesis was to investigate the impact of gaze-based assistive technology on daily activities in children with severe physical impairments and without speech. The objectives were to develop and pilot a gaze-based assistive technology intervention (GAT intervention) at home and in school for these children and to understand its impact on daily activities as experienced by their parents. Methods: Study I was a pilot study in which the basic components that were developed for the intervention were evaluated for students with physical impairments. The study aimed at improving the use of computers as assistive technology (AT) in school. Based on the findings in Study I, the GAT intervention was developed. The GAT intervention aimed at implementing gaze-based AT in daily activities. It consisted of two parts; having access to gaze-based AT and having access to services from a multi professional communication team during nine to ten months. Studies II-IV concerned gazebased AT for children with severe physical impairments without speech who participated in the GAT intervention. The participants were ten children (ages 1-15) (Studies II, III), and their parents (Study IV). Studies II and III had longitudinal designs and children were followed during 15-20 months with repeated measurements before, after and at follow-up. In Study II children’s repertoire of computer activities, extent of use, and goal attainment with gaze-based AT was evaluated, as well as parents’ satisfaction with the AT and with services. In Study III children’s eye gaze performance when using gaze-based AT was examined. In Study IV, parents were interviewed twice with the aim of  exploring their experiences of children’s gaze-based AT use in daily life. In Study IV a hermeneutical approach was used. Results: The findings of Study I showed that the basic components of intervention improved the use of computers in school. Study II showed an increased repertoire of computer activities with the gazebased AT, maintained use in daily activities for all at follow up, and that all children attained goals for gaze-based AT use in daily activities. Parents were satisfied with the gaze-based AT, and with the services in the GAT intervention. In study III, nine children improved in eye gaze performance over time when using the gaze-based AT in daily activities. Study IV revealed that children’s gaze-based AT usage in daily activities made a difference to parents since the children demonstrated agency, and showed their personality and competencies by using gaze-based AT, and for the parents this opened up infinite possibilities for the child to do and learn things. Overall, children’s gaze-based AT usage provided parents with hope of a future in which their children could develop and have influence in life. Conclusions: This thesis shows that these children with severe physical impairments and without speech acquired sufficient gaze control skills to use gaze-based AT for daily activities in the home and at school. The gaze-based AT had a positive impact on performing activities, for example, play activities and communication- and interaction-related activities. For the parents, children’s gaze-based AT usage made a difference since it shaped a hope of a better future for their children, where they can develop and gain influence in their future life. Furthermore, the children continued to perform daily activities with gaze-based AT over time. This finding suggests that key persons were provided with sufficient knowledge and skills to support children in maintained use of gaze-based AT after withdrawal of the services provided in the GAT intervention.

Context: Patients with diseases such as locked in syndrome or motor neuron are paralyzed and they need special care. To reduce the cost of their care, systems need to be designed where human involvement is minimal and affected people can perform their daily life activities independently. To assess the feasibility and robustness of combinations of input modalities, mobile robot (Spinosaurus) navigation is controlled by a combination of Eye gaze tracking and other input modalities. Objectives: Our aim is to control the robot using EEG brain signals and eye gaze tracking simultaneously. Different combinations of input modalities are used to control the robot and turret movement and then we find out which combination of control technique mapped to control command is most effective. Methods: The method includes developing the interface and control software. An experiment involving 15 participants was conducted to evaluate control of the mobile robot using a combination of eye tracker and other input modalities. Subjects were required to drive the mobile robot from a starting point to a goal along a pre-defined path. At the end of experiment, a sense of presence questionnaire was distributed among the participants to take their feedback. A qualitative pilot study was performed to find out how a low cost commercial EEG headset, the Emotiv EPOCTM, can be used for motion control of a mobile robot at the end. Results: Our study results showed that the Mouse/Keyboard combination was the most effective for controlling the robot motion and turret mounted camera respectively. In experimental evaluation, the Keyboard/Eye Tracker combination improved the performance by 9%. 86% of participants found that turret mounted camera was useful and provided great assistance in robot navigation. Our qualitative pilot study of the Emotiv EPOCTM demonstrated different ways to train the headset for different actions. Conclusions: In this study, we concluded that different combinations of control techniques could be used to control the devices e.g. a mobile robot or a powered wheelchair. Gaze-based control was found to be comparable with the use of a mouse and keyboard; EEG-based control was found to need a lot of training time and was difficult to train. Our pilot study suggested that using facial expressions to train the Emotiv EPOCTM was an efficient and effective way to train it.

Indiana University-Purdue University Indianapolis (IUPUI) / One of the biggest hurdles to the development of an effective driver state monitor is the that there is no real-time eye-gaze detection. This is primarily due to the fact that such systems require calibration. In this thesis the various aspects that comprise an eye gaze tracker are investigated. From that we developed an eye gaze tracker for automobiles that does not require calibration. We used a monocular camera system with IR light sources placed in each of the three mirrors. The camera system created the bright-pupil effect for robust pupil detection and tracking. We developed an SVM based algorithm for initial eye candidate detection; after that the eyes were tracked using a hybrid Kalman/Mean-shift algorithm. From the tracked pupils, various features such as the location of the glints (reflections in the pupil from the IR light sources) were extracted. This information is then fed into a Generalized Regression Neural Network (GRNN). The GRNN then maps this information into one of thirteen gaze regions in the vehicle.

No description available.

Yes / Evidence has shown that older adults have lower accuracy in Theory-of-Mind (ToM) tasks compared to young adults, but we are still unclear whether the difficulty in decoding mental states in older adults stems from not looking at the critical areas, and more so from the ageing Asian population. Most ToM studies use static images or short vignettes to measure ToM but these stimuli are dissimilar to everyday social interactions. We investigated this question using a dynamic task that measured both accuracy and error types, and examined the links between accuracy and error types to eye gaze fixation at critical areas (e.g. eyes, mouth, body). A total of 82 participants (38 older, 44 young adults) completed the Movie for the Assessment of Social Cognition task on the eye tracker. Results showed that older adults had a lower overall accuracy with more errors in the ipo-ToM (under-mentalising) and no-ToM (lack of mentalisation) conditions compared to young adults. We analysed the eye gaze data using principal components analysis and found that increasing age and looking less at the face were related to lower MASC accuracy in our participants. Our findings suggest that ageing deficits in ToM are linked to a visual attention deficit specific to the perception of socially relevant nonverbal cues. / This study was funded by the Ministry of Higher Education Malaysia (FRGS/1/2016/SS05/SYUC/03/2) awarded to M.H.Y.

Multi-User Virtual Environments (MUVEs) and Massively Multi-player On- line Games (MMOGs) are a popular, immersive genre of computer game. For some disabled users, eye-gaze offers the only input modality with the potential for sufficiently high bandwidth to support the range of time-critical interaction tasks required to play. Although, there has been much research into gaze interaction techniques for computer interaction over the past twenty years, much of this has focused on 2D desktop application control. There has been some work that investigates the use of gaze interaction as an additional input device for gaming but very little on using gaze on its own. Further, configuration of these techniques usually requires expert knowledge often beyond the capabilities of a parent, carer or support worker. The work presented in this thesis addresses these issues by the investigation of novel gaze-only interaction techniques. These are to enable at least a beginner level of game play to take place together with a means of adapting the techniques to suit an individual. To achieve this, a collection of novel gaze based interaction techniques have been evaluated through empirical studies. These have been encompassed within an extensible software architecture that has been made available for free download. Further, a metric of reliability is developed that when used as a measure within a specially designed diagnostic test, allows the interaction technique to be adapted to suit an individual. Methods of selecting interaction techniques based upon game task are also explored and a novel methodology based on expert task analysis is developed to aid selection.

The purpose of this thesis is to investigate and understand the effect of a servicescape’s ambient and social conditions on consumers’ service encounter experience and their approach/avoidance behavior in a retail context. In three papers, with a total sample of over 1600 participants (including 550 actual consumers) and seven experiments, the author investigates the effect of music (ambient stimuli), employees’ self-disclosure (verbal social stimuli) and employees’ gazing behavior (nonverbal social stimuli) on consumers’ service encounter experience and approach/avoidance behavior in a retail store. Paper I comprised two experiments, and the aim was to investigate the influence of music on emotions, approach/avoidance behavior. Paper II comprised two experiments, and the aim was to investigate the effect of frontline employees’ personal self-disclosure on consumers’ reciprocal behavior. Paper III comprised three experiments, and the aim was to investigate the influence of employee’s direct eye gaze/ averted eye gaze on consumer emotions, social impression of the frontline employee and encounter satisfaction in different purchase situations. The results in this thesis show that music affects consumers in both positive and negative ways (Paper I). Self-disclosure affects consumers negatively, in such a way that it decreases encounter satisfaction  (Paper II) and, finally, eye gaze affects consumers by regulating both positively – and in some cases also negatively – consumers’ social impression of the frontline employee and their encounter satisfaction (Paper III). The conclusions of this thesis are that both ambient and social stimuli in a servicescape affect consumers’ internal responses, which in turn affect their behavior. Depending on the purchase situation, type of retail, and stimuli, the internal and behavioral responses are different. / The purpose of this thesis is to investigate and understand the effect of a servicescape’s ambient and social conditions on consumers’ service encounter experience and their approach/avoidance behavior in a retail context. In three papers, with a total sample of over 1600 participants (including 550 actual consumers) and seven experiments, the author investigates the effect of music, employees’ self-disclosure and employees’ gazing behavior on consumers’ service encounter experience and approach/avoidance behavior in a retail store. The results in this thesis show that music affects consumers in both positive and negative ways (Paper I). Self-disclosure affects consumers negatively, in such a way that it decreases encounter satisfaction (Paper II) and, finally, eye gaze affects consumers by regulating both positively – and in some cases also negatively – consumers’ social impression of the frontline employee and their encounter satisfaction (Paper III). The conclusions of this thesis are that both ambient and social stimuli in a servicescape affect consumers’ internal responses, which in turn affect their behavior. Depending on the purchase situation, type of retail, and stimuli, the internal and behavioral responses are different.

The preferential looking paradigm was used to investigate how toddlers integrate recently learned grammatical cues with well-established social cues in a novel word-learning scenario. To test this we examined children’s ability to decipher the referent of a novel noun using the grammatical information from a plural cue and social information from an eye-gaze cue. Experiment 1 is the first study showing that children as young as 24 months of age can rely on plural markings alone to infer the referent of a novel noun. Preliminary results of Experiment 2 suggest that when the plural cue is presented alongside contradicting information from a gaze direction cue, children still map the novel word to the grammatically cued object. Taken together, these results suggest that by the time children reach their second birthday, even newly learned grammatical information, such as plural markings, might already outweigh established social cues.

The preferential looking paradigm was used to investigate how toddlers integrate recently learned grammatical cues with well-established social cues in a novel word-learning scenario. To test this we examined children’s ability to decipher the referent of a novel noun using the grammatical information from a plural cue and social information from an eye-gaze cue. Experiment 1 is the first study showing that children as young as 24 months of age can rely on plural markings alone to infer the referent of a novel noun. Preliminary results of Experiment 2 suggest that when the plural cue is presented alongside contradicting information from a gaze direction cue, children still map the novel word to the grammatically cued object. Taken together, these results suggest that by the time children reach their second birthday, even newly learned grammatical information, such as plural markings, might already outweigh established social cues.