Guiding visual search tasks using gaze-contingent auditory feedback

Abstract

In many applications it is necessary to guide humans' visual attention towards certain points in the environment. This can be to highlight certain attractions in a touristic application for smart glasses, to signal important events to the driver of a car or to draw the attention of a user of a desktop system to an important message of the user interface. The question we are addressing here is: How can we guide visual attention if we are not able to do it visually? In the presented approach we use gaze-contingent auditory feedback (sonification) to guide visual attention and show that people are able to make use of this guidance to speed up visual search tasks significantly.