G-VOILA: Gaze-Facilitated Information Querying in Daily Scenarios
This addresses the challenge of ambiguous user queries in daily scenarios for users of wearable devices, though it is incremental as it builds on existing multimodal systems.
The paper tackled the problem of integrating gaze data into information querying systems to make the process more intuitive, by introducing G-VOILA, which combines gaze, visual field, and voice queries, and demonstrated its effectiveness with higher objective and subjective scores in user studies.
Modern information querying systems are progressively incorporating multimodal inputs like vision and audio. However, the integration of gaze -- a modality deeply linked to user intent and increasingly accessible via gaze-tracking wearables -- remains underexplored. This paper introduces a novel gaze-facilitated information querying paradigm, named G-VOILA, which synergizes users' gaze, visual field, and voice-based natural language queries to facilitate a more intuitive querying process. In a user-enactment study involving 21 participants in 3 daily scenarios (p = 21, scene = 3), we revealed the ambiguity in users' query language and a gaze-voice coordination pattern in users' natural query behaviors with G-VOILA. Based on the quantitative and qualitative findings, we developed a design framework for the G-VOILA paradigm, which effectively integrates the gaze data with the in-situ querying context. Then we implemented a G-VOILA proof-of-concept using cutting-edge deep learning techniques. A follow-up user study (p = 16, scene = 2) demonstrates its effectiveness by achieving both higher objective score and subjective score, compared to a baseline without gaze data. We further conducted interviews and provided insights for future gaze-facilitated information querying systems.