Group Gaze-Sharing with Projection Displays
Maurice Koch, Tobias Rau, Vladimir Mikheev, Seyda Öney, Michael Becher, Xiangyu Wang, Nelusa Pathmanathan, Patrick Gralka, Daniel Weiskopf, Kuno Kurzhals
TL;DR
This work addresses communicating visual attention within group collaborations by enabling shared gaze visualization on a tabletop via projection mapping. It proposes a low-cost, scalable pipeline that integrates gaze data from multiple eye-tracking glasses into a common projection space, complemented by object detection for interactive elements. The authors implement three visualization modalities—grid-based heatmaps, gaze trails, and physical object highlighting—and demonstrate them in cooperative puzzle-solving tasks, with accuracy metrics and real-time performance. The approach promotes inclusive, face-to-face interaction without head-mounted displays, with potential applications in education, expert training, and design, while also considering privacy and ethical considerations. The framework offers a foundation for developing gaze-responsive, group-aware visualization tools in workshop and classroom settings.
Abstract
The eyes play an important role in human collaboration. Mutual and shared gaze help communicate visual attention to each other or to a specific object of interest. Shared gaze was typically investigated for pair collaborations in remote settings and with people in virtual and augmented reality. With our work, we expand this line of research by a new technique to communicate gaze between groups in tabletop workshop scenarios. To achieve this communication, we use an approach based on projection mapping to unify gaze data from multiple participants into a common visualization space on a tabletop. We showcase our approach with a collaborative puzzle-solving task that displays shared visual attention on individual pieces and provides hints to solve the problem at hand.