Long range eye tracking: bringing eye tracking into the living room

The demand for improved human computer interaction will lead to increasing adoption of eye tracking in everyday devices. For interaction with devices such as Smart TVs, the eye tracker must operate in more challenging environments such as the home living room. In this paper we present a non-contact eye tracking system that allows for freedom of viewer motion in a living room environment. A pan and tilt mechanism is used to orient the eye tracker, guided by face tracking information from a wide-angle camera. The estimated point of gaze is corrected for viewer movement in realtime, avoiding the need for recalibration. The proposed technique achieves comparable accuracy to desktop systems near the calibration position of less than 1° of visual angle and accuracy of less than 2° of visual angle when the viewer moved a large distance, such as standing or sitting on the other side of the couch. The system performance achieved was more than sufficient to operate a novel, hands-free Smart TV interface.