UsyBus: A Communication Framework among Reusable Agents integrating Eye-Tracking in Interactive Applications

Abstract

Eye movement analysis is a popular method to evaluate whether a user interface meets the users' requirements and abilities. However, with current tools, setting up a usability evaluation with an eye-tracker is resource-consuming, since the areas of interest are defined manually, exhaustively and redefined each time the user interface changes. This process is also error-prone, since eye movement data must be finely synchronised with user interface changes. These issues become more serious when the user interface layout changes dynamically in response to user actions. In addition, current tools do not allow easy integration into interactive applications, and opportunistic code must be written to link these tools to user interfaces. To address these shortcomings and to leverage the capabilities of eye-tracking, we present UsyBus, a communication framework for autonomous, tight coupling among reusable agents. These agents are responsible for collecting data from eye-trackers, analyzing eye movements, and managing communication with other modules of an interactive application. UsyBus allows multiple heterogeneous eye-trackers as input, provides multiple configurable outputs depending on the data to be exploited. Modules exchange data based on the UsyBus communication framework, thus creating a customizable multi-agent architecture. UsyBus application domains range from usability evaluation to gaze interaction applications design. Two case studies, composed of reusable modules from our portfolio, exemplify the implementation of the UsyBus framework.