The Attention-Aware Pipeline: Design Tensions from Making Attention Visible in XR
For XR interaction designers, this work provides a framework to anticipate and address tensions in gaze visualization systems, though it remains at an early, conceptual stage.
The paper introduces the Attention-Aware Pipeline for making gaze visible in XR, identifying design tensions through three systems. A formative study with four musicians confirmed attentional tunneling and disconnection, motivating subtractive intervention as a next step.
Where people look during shared activity carries coordination cues that speech and gesture cannot replace, but these patterns remain invisible to participants. XR headsets make gaze available as real-time input, yet few systems feed it back visually. We frame our work using the Attention-Aware Pipeline (Capture, Record, Revisualize), whose feedback loop means the systems visual response alters what users attend to next, triggering further responses. This generates design tensions whose form depends on each stages configuration. We trace the pipeline through three systems casting attention as a mirror (reflecting gaze history), a medium (sharing it across collaborators), and a mediator (intervening through diminished reality). Each encountered a tension the loop predicted, motivating the next. A formative eye-tracking study of four musicians surfaced attentional tunneling and near-total disconnection, confirming the need for intervention. We present these tensions and a next step: testing whether subtractive intervention reduces tunneling for a single sight-reader.