Other Work

Eye Tracking

In spring 2000 I implemented the Minimal Device Independent Text Input method on eye trackers. I wrote a paper on the project including discussion on other text input systems known to me at that time that could be implemented in similar manner. The paper titled Text Input Methods for Eye Trackers Using Off-Screen targets was presented at ETRA2000. This led me to cooperation with the Visual Interaction Research Group (VIRG). Since the year 2000 we had many interesting discussions, and slowly I became involved in the research more and more. Around the time that the COGAIN network was set up I started to consider myself a member of the community interested in gaze-based interaction. Later I got more and more involved until Prof Räihä asked me to act as his debuty as the leader of the group during his year-long visit to New Zwealand around 2009. I have led the group more permanently after Prof Räihä moved on to other tasks in 2011. Over the years we have published on many topics, but using gaze as an input modality in interaction techniques is the main theme in the majority of our research. Lately we have dreamed of eye tracking smart glasses that one would wear all day long and asked ourselves what would follow if everybody dit that.

Electromyography + Eye Tracking

Back in 2000 people in the Research Group for Emotions, Sociality and Computing (ESC) were doing interesting experiments involving EMG measurements on facial muscles. I participated in the work first by writing software for the interactive use of EMG data. We made some research tools and an interactive demonstrator. As time went on there were multiple such instances.

Fitts' Law

Scott MacKenzie's work on Fitts' law as a tool in modeling user performance with certain text input methods led me to take another look at the huge body of work that is available on Fitts' law in HCI. Over the years I have found interesting questions in pointing devides and Fitts' Law based modeling and performance measurement. Such works include the APCHI2002 paper concerned with the speed and accuracy of six mice. After that I have been involved in some other pointing device work including the TrackMouse (a two-pointer input device with both mouse and trackball functions) work by Martin and Raisamo.

Gaze and haptic feedback

In 2012 Prof Raisamo and I got funding for studying the use of haptic feedback to gaze. We thought that this would be interesting because people do not get much haptic feedback on their eye movements. We found that users have no problems utilizing vibrotactile feedback for their eye movements and it gives a small advantage in measured performance.

Gazing and writing experiments

In the MIPI project where we were investigating use of gaze data in better understanding how people look at things and understand what they see, I constructed a system for recording writing behavior and gaze pahs while people are writing short reports of a scene shown to them on a display. This work led us to studying the analysis os such data. At ETRA 2018 we published a paper on some methods of exploratory analysis of gaze data that we found useful and novel enough.

Scents and dog technology

In 2017 I found myself entirely immersed in ESC work. First there was a project on digital scents, where we investigated measuring and reproducing scents. Later we worked on dog technology. We set up experiments to see how dog activity trackers influence the life of dogs. Based on the findings we then designed and built better ways of visualizing the data to the dog owners.