Toward A Pervasive Gaze-Contingent Assistance System: Attention and Context-Awareness in Augmented Reality

Mobile devices with high-speed connectivity provide us with access to gigabytes of high resolution images, videos, and graphics. For instance, a head-worn display can be used to augment the real view with digitized visual information (Figure 1). Eye tracking helps us to understand how we process visual information and it allows us to develop gaze-enabled interactive systems. For instance, foveated gaze-contingent displays (GCDs) dynamically adjust the level of detail according to the user’s point-of-interest. We propose that GCDs should take users’ attention and cognitive load into account, augment their vision with contextual information and provide personalized assistance in solving visual tasks. Grounded on existing literature, we identified several research questions that need to be discussed before developing such displays.