Eye tracking is challenging on small head-mounted displays due to the limited field of view and need for more accurate eye trackers, limited physical space between eye and the HMD that makes it hard to place the camera in a good position. This project was our first attempt to add a gaze tracker to a small monocular HMD (MicroOptical SV-9). We tracked the other eye of the user by placing a hot mirror and a camera in front of the user’s eye to capture eye movements. We also added a head-tracking sensor (Sparkfun 9DoF Razor)  to our home-made smartglass to explore two different modalities for a point and selection task on the HMD: eye movements and head movements. Our study showed that head pointing was more accurate but it was tiring specially for far targets while eye pointing was faster but not accurate for small targets due to the inaccuracy of our eye tracker. This led us to the Magic pointing study where we combined eye and head movements for a target acquisition task.

Jalaliniya, S. et al. “Head and eye movement as pointing modalities for eyewear computers”. Proceedings of the 2014 11th International Conference on Wearable and Implantable Body Sensor Networks Workshops. IEEE Computer Society Press. 2014.