The Eye Tribe

Robert J.K. Jacob did a paper on "WHAT YOU LOOK AT IS WHAT YOU GET: EYE MOVEMENT-BASED INTERACTION TECHNIQUES" where he propose two techniques to counter the Midas Touch problem.

[*]Keypad
[*]Dwell time

A third possible interaction technique can be presented by using eye winks. This can be achieved by blinking on one of the eyes or closing the eyes for a longer time. However Jacob rejects this as a possible interaction technique since it is not natural in an eye movement-base dialogue, making the user to think about when he or she should blink.

I think its important to share this idea and approach, so interaction is not based on blinking.

Interesting, thanks for sharing.

Here we use several techniques for eye tracking interactions, I think this really depends on the people using it, if this person has a disability and what they want to do with the computer (browsing/gaming/social media...)

Blinking can be useful for some contextual interaction (open a context menu with a blinking combination for example), it may not be used as a click on a mouse I totally agree. Head movements are also an interesting behavior when it's possible to use it, but we're not in the "pure" eye tracking anymore But I think that the eye tracking is a fantastic solution when combined with other tracking device (hands/body/voice/etc...)

Do you know how can I incorporate eye-blink based gestures using The Eye Tribe tracker?

If lefteye.avg is 0.0 and righteye.avg is not 0.0 and greater, this could indicate a blink on the left eye. If you set a limit of 300-800ms or even more, you could create your own gestures.

Nothing specific to add but I would like to underline the importance of this topic. While many potential users are candidates for the "eye-gaze only" access, there are perhaps (I have no statistics) many others who would be candidates for hybrid systems, eye-gaze plus switch (i.e. == click).

For those who might want to try, Camera Mouse
http://www.cameramouse.org/

works unexpectedly well and you can leave the dwell setting off and use the mouse button (or an adaptive switch configured in that modality). This permits ready assessment of a potential user with possibly zero expense (given that many have Windows platforms with webcams).