We present a privacy-enhancing mechanism for gaze signals using a latent-noise autoencoder that prevents users from being re-identified across play sessions without their consent, while retaining the usability of the data for benign tasks. We evaluate privacy-utility trade-offs across biometric identification and gaze prediction tasks, showing that our approach significantly reduces biometric identifiability with minimal utility degradation. Unlike prior methods in this direction, our framework retains physiologically plausible gaze patterns suitable for downstream use, which produces favorable privacy-utility trade-off. This work advances privacy in gaze-based systems by providing a usable and effective mechanism for protecting sensitive gaze data.

Virtual reality (VR) sensors capture large amounts of user data, including body motion and eye tracking, that contain personally identifying information. While privacy-enhancing techniques can obfuscate this data, incomplete privacy protections risk privacy leakage, which may allow adversaries to leverage unprotected data to identify users without consent. This work examines the extent to which unprotected body motion data can undermine privacy protections for eye tracking data, and vice versa, to enable user identification in VR. These findings highlight a privacy consideration at the intersection of eye tracking and VR, and emphasize the need for privacy protections that address these technologies comprehensively.

We present an analysis of the eye tracking capabilities of the Meta Quest Pro virtual reality headset using a dataset of eye movement recordings collected from 78 participants. We highlight the potential differences in user experience as a function of device performance using a novel, user-centered evaluation framework for eye tracking signal quality analysis. In addition to presenting classical signal quality metrics such as spatial accuracy and spatial precision, we also explore how spatial accuracy varies across the field of view for different users across the performance range of the device. This work contributes to a growing understanding of eye tracking signal quality in virtual reality platforms, where the usability of gaze-based applications is directly dependent on the quality of the device’s eye tracking signal.

Thanks to the eye-tracking sensors that are embedded in emerging consumer devices like the Vive Pro Eye, we demonstrate that it is feasible to deliver user authentication via eye movement biometrics.

The recent emergence of ubiquitous, multi-platform eye tracking has raised user privacy concerns involving a threat that we have termed “cross-platform identity linkage.” This privacy violation may occur when a person is re-identified across multiple eye tracking-enabled platforms using personally identifying information that is implicitly expressed through their eye movement. We present an empirical investigation quantifying a modern eye movement biometric model’s ability to link subject identities across three different eye tracking devices using eye movement signals from each device. We show that a state-of-the art eye movement biometrics model demonstrates above-chance levels of biometric performance (34.99% equal error rate, 15% rank-1 identification rate) when linking user identities across one pair of devices, but not for the other. Considering these findings, we also discuss the impact that eye tracking signal quality has on the model’s ability to meaningfully associate a subject’s identity between two substantially different eye tracking devices. Our investigation advances a fundamental understanding of the privacy risks for identity linkage across platforms by employing both quantitative and qualitative measures of biometric performance, including a visualization of the model’s ability to distinguish genuine and imposter authentication attempts across platforms.

This paper proposes a novel evaluation framework, termed "critical evaluation periods," for evaluating continuous gaze prediction models. This framework emphasizes prediction performance when it is most critical for gaze prediction to be accurate relative to user perception. Based on perceptual characteristics of the human visual system such as saccadic suppression, this framework provides a more practical assessment of gaze prediction performance for gaze-contingent rendering compared to the dominant sample-by-sample evaluation strategy employed in literature, which overemphasizes performance during easy-to-predict periods of fixation. Using a case study with a lightweight deep learning gaze prediction model, we observe a significant discrepancy in the reported prediction accuracy between the proposed critical evaluation periods and the dominant evaluation strategy employed in literature. Based on our findings, we suggest that the proposed framework is more suitable for evaluating the performance of continuous gaze prediction models intended for gaze-contingent rendering applications.

We present an analysis of the eye tracking signal quality of the HoloLens 2’s integrated eye tracker. Signal quality was measured from eye movement data captured during a random saccades task from a new eye movement dataset collected on 30 healthy adults. We characterize the eye tracking signal quality of the device in terms of spatial accuracy, spatial precision, temporal precision, linearity, and crosstalk. Most notably, our evaluation of spatial accuracy reveals that the eye movement data in our dataset appears to be uncalibrated. Recalibrating the data using a subset of our dataset task produces notably better eye tracking signal quality.

Comparing the performance of new eye-tracking devices against an established benchmark is vital for identifying differences in the way eye movements are reported by each device. This paper introduces a new paired data set comprised of eye movement recordings captured simultaneously with both the EyeLink 1000—considered the “gold standard” in eye-tracking research studies—and the recently released AdHawk MindLink eye tracker. Our work presents a methodology for simultaneous data collection and a comparison of the resulting eye-tracking signal quality achieved by each device.

Metric learning is a valuable technique for enabling the ongoing enrollment of new users within biometric systems. While this approach has been heavily employed for other biometric modalities such as facial recognition, applications to eye movements have only recently been explored. This manuscript further investigates the application of metric learning to eye movement biometrics. A set of three multilayer perceptron networks are trained for embedding feature vectors describing three classes of eye movements: fixations, saccades, and post-saccadic oscillations. The network is validated on a dataset containing eye movement traces of 269 subjects recorded during a reading task. The proposed algorithm is benchmarked against a previously introduced statistical biometric approach. While mean equal error rate (EER) was increased versus the benchmark method, the proposed technique demonstrated lower dispersion in EER across the four test folds considered herein.