Evaluation of Binocular Eye Trackers and Algorithms for 3D Gaze Interaction in Virtual Reality Environments

Tracking user’s visual attention is a fundamental aspect in novel human-computer interaction paradigms found in Virtual Reality. For example, multimodal interfaces or dialogue-based communications with virtual and real agents greatly benefit from the analysis of the user’s visual attention as a vital source for deictic references or turn-taking signals. Current approaches to determine visual attention rely primarily on monocular eye trackers. Hence they are restricted to the interpretation of two-dimensional fixations relative to a defined area of projection. The study presented in this article compares precision, accuracy and application performance of two binocular eye tracking devices. Two algorithms are compared which derive depth information as required for visual attention-based 3D interfaces. This information is further applied to an improved VR selection task in which a binocular eye tracker and an adaptive neural network algorithm is used during the disambiguation of partly occluded objects.

Why Freeter and NEET are Misunderstood: Recognizing the New Precarious Conditions of Japanese Youth

In developed countries, the transition from school to work has radically changed over the past two decades. It has become prolonged, complicated and individualized (Bynner et al., 1997; Walther et al., 2004). Young people used to transition directly from school to stable employment, or with a very short unemployed period. In many European countries, this situation has been changing since the eighties: overall youth unemployment has increased, and many young people experience long periods of unemployment, government training schemes and part-time or temporary jobs. In Japan, this change has taken a decade later to appear, becoming prevalent by the late nineties (Inui, 2003). The transiting process has become not only precarious for young people, but also difficult for society to precisely understand the risks and problems. Traditionally, we have been able to recognize young people's situation by a simple category: in education, employed, in training or unemployed. However, these categories no longer accurately represent young people's state. In Japan, most young people used to move from school directly to full-time employment through the new graduate recruitment system (Inui, 1993). Therefore, in official statistics such as the School Basic Survey, 'employed' includes only those who are in regular employment, while those who are in part-time or temporary work are covered by the categories 'jobless' and 'others'. However, with the increase in non-full-time jobs in the nineties, these categories have become less useful for describing the actual employment conditions of young people. Indeed, this is why, in the late of nineties, the Japanese Ministry of Education changed the category name from 'jobless' to 'others'.