As Go the Feet : On the Estimation of Attentional Focus from Stance. Conference Paper uri icon

abstract

  • The estimation of the direction of visual attention is critical to a large number of interactive systems. This paper investigates the cross-modal relation of the position of one's feet (or standing stance) to the focus of gaze. The intuition is that while one CAN have a range of attentional foci from a particular stance, one may be MORE LIKELY to look in specific directions given an approach vector and stance. We posit that the cross-modal relationship is constrained by biomechanics and personal style. We define a stance vector that models the approach direction before stopping and the pose of a subject's feet. We present a study where the subjects' feet and approach vector are tracked. The subjects read aloud contents of note cards in 4 locations. The order of `visits' to the cards were randomized. Ten subjects read 40 lines of text each, yielding 400 stance vectors and gaze directions. We divided our data into 4 sets of 300 training and 100 test vectors and trained a neural net to estimate the gaze direction given the stance vector. Our results show that 31% our gaze orientation estimates were within 5, 51% of our estimates were within 10, and 60% were within 15. Given the ability to track foot position, the procedure is minimally invasive.

name of conference

  • Proceedings of the 10th international conference on Multimodal interfaces

published proceedings

  • ACM Trans Comput Hum Interact

author list (cited authors)

  • Quek, F., Ehrich, R., & Lockhart, T.

citation count

  • 5

complete list of authors

  • Quek, Francis||Ehrich, Roger||Lockhart, Thurmon

publication date

  • October 2008