HeadDepth

Also known as Gaze raycasting with head pitch, Relative, EdgeGain, PingPong

Hands-free 3D pointing: gaze sets the direction of a ray and tilting the head up or down (pitch) moves a cursor in depth along it.

How it works

The cursor sits on the gaze ray; vertical head rotation moves it nearer or farther along the line of sight, so gaze picks direction and head pitch picks depth without using the hands. Because pitching the head also shifts the eye-in-head angle, three pitch-to-depth mappings were designed: Relative (pitch velocity maps to depth change with speed-dependent gain, like RayCursor), EdgeGain (gain also rises when the eyes are near the edge of their comfortable range) and PingPong (an absolute back-and-forth mapping that repeats across pitch angles). Evaluated in a 3D docking task (1–5 m depth range, HTC Vive Pro Eye) against controller-based RayCursor: slower than RayCursor but hands-free; PingPong needed least effort and EdgeGain was least affected by task. Positions were confirmed with a controller trigger in the study.

Papers

Haopeng Wang, Florian Weidner, Yasmeen Abdrabou, Ken Pfeuffer, Hans Gellersen (2025). HeadDepth: Gaze Raycasting with Head Pitch for Depth Control. IEEE International Symposium on Mixed and Augmented Reality (ISMAR), pp. 370–380 doi:10.1109/ISMAR67309.2025.00048