Eyes and hands — MRTK2

How to support look + hand motions (eye gaze & hand gestures)

This page explains how to use eye targeting as a primary pointer in combination with hand motions. In our MRTK eye tracking demos, we describe several examples for using eyes + hands, for example:

• Selection: Looking at distant holographic button and simply performing a pinch gesture to quickly select it.
• Positioning (this article): Fluently move a hologram across your scene by simply looking at it, pinching your index finger and thumb together to grab it and then move it around using your hand.
• Navigation: Simply look at a location you want to zoom in, pinch your index finger and thumb together and pull your hand toward you to zoom in.

Please note that MRTK is currently designed in a way that at a distance hand rays act as the prioritized focus pointers. This means that the head and eye gaze pointers will automatically be suppressed once a hand is detected and will become visible again after saying "Select". However, this may not be the way you would like to interact at a distance and rather favor a simple 'gaze and commit' interaction independent of the presence of hands in your view.

How to disable the hand ray

To disable the hand ray pointer, simply remove the 'DefaultControllerPointer' in your Input -> Pointer MRTK configuration setting. To use eyes and hands as described above in your app, please also make sure that you meet all of the requirements for using eye tracking.

You can also check out, how the input profile EyeTrackingDemoPointerProfile from the eye tracking sample package is set up as a reference.

How to keep gaze pointer always on

To avoid having the head or eye gaze pointers automatically suppressed once a hand is detected, the gaze PointerBehavior can be specified to control whether it should be on or off.

// Turn on gaze pointer
PointerUtils.SetGazePointerBehavior(PointerBehavior.AlwaysOn);

See Controllers Pointers and Focus

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