PeepList: Adapting ex-post interaction with pervasive display content using eye tracking

Short intensive interactions with unfamiliar pervasive displays coerce users to perform cognitive operations with uncertainty and risk of not being able to access the information of relevance later. We developed a new way of interaction with pervasive displays by harnessing the eye tracking technology to extract information that is most likely relevant to the user. These extracted bits of important information are presented to the user and sorted according to their estimated importance—in the PeepList. The users can interact with the PeepList without explicit commands and they can access the customized PeepList ex-post in order to review information previously consumed from the pervasive display.We carried out a user study involving 16 participants to evaluate the contribution of PeepList to efficient pervasive display interaction. The tests revealed that the PeepList system is unobtrusive, accurate, and in particular it reduces the interaction times by 40% when complex tasks were presented to the participants. A feasible user model can be built in under 30 seconds in 50% of all interactions, and in one minute, a majority of all interactions (70%) lead to a useful user model. Experimental results show that eye tracking is a valuable real-time implicit source of information about what the user is searching for on a pervasive display and that it can be used for real-time user interface adaptation. This considerably improves the efficiency of obtaining and retaining required data.