Using Eye Tracking to Improve Information Retrieval in Virtual Reality

Virtual Reality (VR) has the potential to transform the way we work, rest and play. This promise comes with new challenges. One challenge sterns from the interactive nature of iminersive Virtual Environments (VEs). Placement. of contextual information in VEs can he critical to the user experience. This poster describes the use of eve-tracking to alleviate usability issues surrounding information presentation in immersive VEs. Results from our experiments show that integrating eye tracking into a VE to dictate where and when textual information is presented can improve performance when searching for contextual information. In summary, the results show improvement in task performance when the new direct method is employed to reveal information in target regions based on gaze. This seems to hold true independent of the VE or the type of information questioned.