6.4 Future Research

In the above sections we have posed some questions, some concerning some problems with the present available technology and knowledge.

Consciousness

In what degree does conscious tracking interact with the way people act while watching IES media?

Features

Are all of the features in table 12 essential to facilitate IES ?

Application possibilities

Will IES be applied to recreative viewing, entertainment interaction, commercials, information browsing systems, television programmes and educational programmes?

Compression techniques

Does the lossy compression techniques have any influence?

Heuristic selection

Should a simple average be the only way to select the path through an IES script? Could heuristics be discovered to bring better path selections? For instance are the algorithms used in the "Little Prince" (Starker & Bolt 1990) system better and in what ways?

All these questions are to be delved into, as well as the problems mentioned in section 6.1.2, since they are crucial to the future succes of eye-gaze tracking. Other issues, that we have not found essential to write about in this thesis, but issues we find important to attend to, are:

Juridical Problems

When being able to track other people using, say, computers in a network, should it be permitted by the law to track them during work, to make acount of how active or productive they are. Is this too close on the "Big Brother is watching you" term from George Orwell's "1984"? Tracking of keybord activity has been used in supermarkets to monitor people working at cash registers in the USA. Is there any difference between tracking keybords on cash registers and between tracking eyes on computer monitors? If permission for the latter is given, an enormous amount of people will be controlled in the future. Will this be a problem?

Long Term Usage Problems

Could new kinds of physiological problems be introduced when working while being eye-gaze tracked at long term? We believe that stress might be a factor (cf. the juridical problems above). We already know from Risø National Research Laboratory, that people can get tired, or get strained eyes after using the EyeCatcher for around 30 minutes. Is this general or just a side effect of the crude technology available today?

CSCW

How can eye-gaze control be combined with CSCW? Eye-gaze control adds a whole new dimension to video-meetings, text editing etc. since attention becomes measurable at "run-time." Text editing might be augmented with a new feature, as documents edited by several authors could be displayed with the amount of attention each section has received. A section receiving much attention could imply that either it is interesting or difficult to read. The amount of received attention could be visualised by a coloured box surrounding the text concerned (red colour if the text has been slowly reread many times or by many of the co-authors, blue otherwise). Figures in the document could also be annotated if considerably much time has been spent looking at the description of the figure and the figure itself (we assert that links have been made between the text and the figure description caption).