BodyPursuits : Exploring Smooth Pursuit Gaze Interaction Based on Body Motion Targets

Hansen, Anja and Makarem, Sarah and Kunze, Kai and Zhou, Yexu and Knierim, Michael Thomas and Clarke, Christopher and Gellersen, Hans and Beigl, Michael and Röddiger, Tobias (2025) BodyPursuits : Exploring Smooth Pursuit Gaze Interaction Based on Body Motion Targets. In: ETRA '25: Proceedings of the 2025 Symposium on Eye Tracking Research and Applications :. ACM, New York, 3:1-3:8. ISBN 9798400714870

Abstract

Smooth pursuits are natural eye movements that occur when we track a moving target with our gaze. While they were explored as a gaze-based input method using external screens to display moving stimuli, we propose BodyPursuits, a novel HCI method that eliminates additional screens. Stimuli are generated by users tracing smooth trajectories with their hand in mid-air while fixating their gaze on their thumb. We conducted a user study to collect eye-tracking and baseline IMU data from 20 participants performing 10 BodyPursuits gestures. Based on 1800 samples and noise data, we train a TinyHAR classifier. It achieves a macro-average F1 score of 0.772. With UEQ results indicating a positive user experience and RTLX scores showcasing low subjective workload for all 10 gestures, we successfully demonstrated BodyPursuits’ potential as viable interaction method. We envision BodyPursuits could be integrated into EOG earphones to detect mid-air hand gestures without external screens or cameras.