Eyes are different than Hands: An Analysis of Gaze as Input Modality for Industrial Man-Machine Interactions

With the advancing digitalization of industrial production, the need for new man-machine interaction techniques, that go beyond traditional input and output systems, is arising. In this paper, we investigate the potential of gaze-only machine controls and its implications. In order to achieve that, a prototypical system is built upon a mobile eye tracker, that allows users to trigger binary actions and manipulate object states. To evaluate our approach, two user studies with 35 participants in total were conducted in controlled laboratory environments. A detailed comparison between physical and gaze-only interaction highlights significant improvements of interaction efficiency up from a certain distance and we further found that the distance to the objects had no significant effect on the task completion times for gaze-only interactions within the scope of the study. Finally, two placements of selection areas for advanced interactions, that go beyond binary, were evaluated in detail.