Eye Gaze as a Signal for Conveying User Attention in Contextual AI Systems

Advanced multimodal AI agents can now collaborate with users to solve challenges in the world. We explore eye tracking's role in such interaction to convey a user's attention relative to the physical environment. We hypothesize that this knowledge improves contextual understanding for AI agents. By observing hours of human-object interactions, we first measure the relationship between an eye tracker's signal quality and its ability to reliably place gaze on nearby physical objects. We then conduct experiments which relay the user's scanpath history as additional context querying multimodal agents. Our results show that eye tracking provides high value as a user attention signal and can convey information about the user's current task and interests to the agent.

OpenEDS: Open Eye Dataset

We present a large scale data set, OpenEDS: Open Eye Dataset, of eye-images captured using a virtual-reality (VR) head mounted display mounted with two synchronized eyefacing cameras at a frame rate of 200 Hz under controlled illumination. This dataset is compiled from video capture of the eye-region collected from 152 individual participants and is divided into four subsets: (i) 12,759 images with pixel-level annotations for key eye-regions: iris, pupil and sclera (ii) 252,690 unlabelled eye-images, (iii) 91,200 frames from randomly selected video sequence of 1.5 seconds in duration and (iv) 143 pairs of left and right point cloud data compiled from corneal topography of eye regions collected from a subset, 143 out of 152, participants in the study. A baseline experiment has been evaluated on OpenEDS for the task of semantic segmentation of pupil, iris, sclera and background, with the mean intersectionover-union (mIoU) of 98.3 %. We anticipate that OpenEDS will create opportunities to researchers in the eye tracking community and the broader machine learning and computer vision community to advance the state of eye-tracking for VR applications. The dataset is available for download upon request at https://research.fb.com/programs/openeds-challenge