Gaze Guiding as Support for the Control of Technical Systems

Abstract

The control of technical systems is often defined by standard operating procedures, e.g. provided by paper-based manuals or decision trees. These procedures specify how a human operator should handle a specific situation occurring in the system control, which might also be safety-critical. This work presents a concept of guiding users' gaze in such control scenarios of technical systems, which aims at preventing the user from having to leave the control context in order to consult such a paper-based standard operating procedure. Instead, the presented approach fades in information into the control interface based on the current situation of the system and the intended procedure. The work further argues for the use of this technique in the context of refresher-based training to enhance retrieval of once-learned knowledge. This concept, called gaze guiding, has been implemented in a framework in which it can be applied to existing control interfaces. The feasibility of gaze guiding in such control scenarios is demonstrated in a user study with 21 participants.