Induce a Blink of the Eye: Evaluating Techniques for Triggering Eye Blinks in Virtual Reality

Induce a Blink of the Eye: Evaluating Techniques for Triggering Eye Blinks in Virtual Reality

As more and more virtual reality (VR) headsets support eye tracking, recent techniques started to use eye blinks to induce unnoticeable manipulations to the virtual environment, e.g., to redirect users' actions. However, to exploit their full potential, more control over users' blinking behavior in VR is required. To this end, we propose a set of reflex-based blink triggers that are suited specifically for VR.

In accordance with blink-based techniques for redirection, we formulate (i) effectiveness, (ii) efficiency, (iii) reliability, and (iv) unobtrusiveness as central requirements for successful triggers. We implement the soft- and hardware-based methods and compare the four most promising approaches in a user study. Our results highlight the pros and cons of the tested triggers, and show those based on the menace, corneal, and dazzle reflexes to perform best. From these results, we derive recommendations that help choosing suitable blink triggers for VR applications.

The blink triggers for VR and the results of the conducted user study are presented in the Bachelor's Thesis by Kristin Ullmann and in the corresponding paper published at ACM CHI 2023. 

Induce a Blink of the Eye: Evaluating Techniques for Triggering Eye Blinks in Virtual Reality
André Zenner (Saarland University & DFKI), Kristin Ullmann (Saarland University), Oscar Ariza (Universität Hamburg), Frank Steinicke (Universität Hamburg), Antonio Krüger (Saarland University & DFKI)
Proceedings of the 2023 CHI Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems (ACM CHI ’23)
DOI: https://doi.org/10.1145/3544548.3580888
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