Looking Around with your brain in a virtual world

To make an interface easy to learn and easy to use, it should be natural. We have developed a prototype in which overt and covert attention input is applied in a natural way. This paper describes the development and offline evaluation of two analysis pipelines: (1) for the detection of covert attention from electroencephalography recordings, and (2) for the detection of overt attention in terms of eye movement based on electro-oculographic measurements. The game is set in a virtual environment where player is a wildlife photographer. Overt attention is used to adjust the angle of the first person camera, when the player is tracking animals. When the animal that is photographed notices it is looked at directly, it will flee. Therefore, the player should use covert attention to get a good photograph. Covert attention can be detected with an accuracy of 67 % in two directions. Horizontal and vertical eye movement can be determined with an average error of 2.2 cm and 4.8 cm respectively.