This thesis is submitted in partial fulfilment of the requirements for a Danish Bachelor's Degree in information psychology for both authors. It contains work done from February to May 1995. Our supervisor on the project has been John Paulin Hansen, the Risø National Laboratory. The thesis has been made solely by the authors; most of the text, however, is based on the research of others, and we have done our best to provide references to these sources.
In December 1994, our teacher in cognitive psychology at that time, John Paulin Hansen, introduced us to one of his latest developments: an application intended for public use and operated solely by the eyes of the user, called the "EyeCatcher." We were both impressed and intrigued by this new means of controlling a computer, so when John presented a list of projects to Arne, including the present one, the choice of the "EyeCatcher" project was obvious.
In the spring semester of 1995 we were to write up our minor's thesis on information psychology. Initially, we worked on two different projects, Theo working together with another group on a 3-D operating systems project and Arne working alone on the "EyeCatcher" project. Soon, however, it was evident that we could make a better project by joining forces, and we believe that the present thesis confirms this.
Writing this thesis has been hard but in the process of writing we feel we have learned a lot and our initial conceptions of eye-gaze controlling have certainly changed! We have dealt with a lot of subjects, in an attempt to give this thesis a broad perspective on eye-gaze control, thus combining many aspects of cognitive psychology and human-computer interaction.
Since this thesis is written as the final thesis of the bachelor's degree in information psychology, the text is primarily aimed at teachers of information psychology at the University of Copenhagen and pupils attending the courses there, but we hope it will be of interest for the general HCI and cognitive psychology communities, too.
We would like to thank our supervisor, John Paulin Hansen, for lots of great inspiration, ideas, comments and an endless stream of articles. Especially our meetings at Risø National Laboratory have given us much inspiration, due to John's, to us, remarkable ability to cheer us up when we were in desperate need of it because everything seemed impossible and fruitless.
Thanks also to Anja Philip and "EyeCatcher"-pilot Jesper Brix, both from the Experimentarium , for letting us stay there for two days, evaluating the "EyeCatcher."
Finally, lots of thanks are due to Claus Dantzer-Sørensen for expertly proof-reading this thesis and especially Jill Glenstrup who had the laborious job of turning our attempts at the English language into readable prose. Hopefully she has removed all the serious errors, but any that might be left are wholly our responsibility.