Looking my Way through the Menu: The Impact of Menu Design and Multimodal Input on Gaze-based Menu Selection

In this paper a study is reported, which investigates the effectiveness of two approaches to improving gaze-based interaction for realistic and complex menu selection tasks. The first approach focuses oil identifying menu designs for hierarchical menus that are particularly Suitable for gaze-based interaction, whereas the second approach is based oil the idea of combining gaze-based interaction with speech as a second input modality. In an experiment with 40 participants the impact of menu design, input device, and navigation complexity on accuracy and completion time in a menu selection task as well its on user satisfaction were investigated. The results concerning both objective task performance and subjective ratings confirmed our expectations in that a semi-circle menu was better suited for gaze-based menu selection than either a linear or a full-circle menu. Contrary 10 our expectations, an input device solely based on eye gazes turned out to be superior to the combined gaze- and speech-based device. Moreover, the drawbacks of a less Suitable menu design (i.e., of a linear menu or a full-circle menu) as well as of the multimodal input device particularly obstructed performance in the case of more complex navigational tasks.