This paper documents the engineering of a gaze contingent therapeutic environment for the exploration and validation of a proposed rehabilitative technique addressing attention deficits in 24 to 54 months old autistic subjects. It discusses the current state of progress and lessons learnt so far while highlighting the outstanding engineering challenges of this project. We focus on calibration issues for this target group of users, explain the architecture of the system and present our general workflow for the construction of the gaze contingent environment. While this work is being undertaken for therapeutic purposes, it is likely to be relevant to the construction of gaze contingent displays for entertainment.

Addressing data visualization challenges typically involves applying lessons from visualization theory to inform design and implementation approaches. This process is shaped to a large extent by the availability of tools that are aimed at enabling visualization designers to focus on visualization design rather than on low-level software engineering. Recently, such tools have become powerful enough to be used effectively. We discuss the ideation process informing our design approach and describe the use of Macromedia Flash MX 2004 for the rapid prototyping of a gaze data visualization tool. We highlight selected gaze data visualization ideas to illustrate the most innovative aspects of our design. In particular, we explain our strategy to reveal the underlying mechanisms that produce the summarizing visual constructs and why this is important. We introduce a new technique for visualizing gaze data for dynamic stimuli. The novelty of this approach is that it avoids the traditional frame-by-frame analyses typically carried out for such stimuli.

Although there have been many prototypes of visualization in support of information retrieval, there has been little systematic evaluation that distinguishes the benefits of the visualization per se from that of various accompanying features.The current study focuses on such an evaluation of NIRVE, a tool that supports visualization of search results.Insofar as possible, functionally equivalent 3D, 2D, and text versions of NIRVE were implemented.Nine novices and six professional users completed a series of information-seeking tasks on a set of retrieved documents.There were high interface costs for the 3D visualization, although those costs decreased substantially with experience.Performance was best when the tool's properties matched task demands; only under the right combination of task, user, and interface did 3D visualization result in performance comparable to functionally matched 2D and textual tools.

No abstract available.

An important part of communication is being able to point to an object without referring to its components or to the area surrounding it. How to do this is the problem of ostension. We observed many ostension errors in novices learning to use a full-screen text editor. Specifically, the novices erroneously tried to use keys that are appropriate for pointing when using a typewriter but incorrect in screen editors (e.g., space bar, backspace key, etc.), they frequently missed the location they intended by one character, they inadvertently pointed to the wrong occurrcnce of a string using a FIND command, they incorrectly specified boundaries by forgetting about “invisible” characters (e.g., formatting characters), and they mistakenly attempted to point to non-typing areas of the screen that were off-limits.