EyeWear 2019: Third Workshop on EyeWear Computing Focus: Social Interactions
Benjamin Tag

Jamie A Ward

Keio University
tagbenja@kmd.keio.ac.jp

Goldsmiths University of London
jamie@jamieward.net

Yuji Uema

Kai Kunze

J!NS Inc.
yuji-uema@jin-co.com

Keio University
kai.kunze@gmail.com

Figure 1: Examples of commercial Smart Eyewear. Microsoft Hololense 2, J!NS MEME, Focals by North, Focals in battery case

ABSTRACTKEYWORDS

Computing devices worn on the human body have a long history
in academic and industrial research, most importantly in wearable
computing, mobile eye tracking, and mobile mixed and augmented
reality. As humans receive most of their sensory input via the head,
it is a very interesting body location for simultaneous sensing andinteraction as well as cognitive assistance. Eyewear Computing
devices have recently emerged as commercial products and canprovide an research platform for a range of fields, including humancomputer interaction, ubiquitous computing, pervasive sensing,
psychology and social sciences. The proposed workshop will bring
together researchers from a wide range of disciplines, such as mobileand ubiquitous computing, eye tracking, optics, computer vision,
human vision and perception, usability, as well as systems research.
This year it will also bring in researchers from psychology, with afocus on the social and interpersonal aspects of eyewear technology.
The workshop is a continuation from 2016/2018 and will focus on
discussing application scenarios as well as focusing on eyewear
sensing and supporting social interactions.

smart eyewear, eyewear computing, augmented reality, sensing,context

CCS CONCEPTS• Computer systems organization → Embedded systems.

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UbiComp/ISWC ’19 Adjunct, September 9–13, 2019, London, United Kingdom© 2019 Copyright held by the owner/author(s).
ACM ISBN 978-1-4503-6869-8/19/09.
https://doi.org/10.1145/3341162.3347761

616

ACM Reference Format:
Benjamin Tag, Jamie A Ward, Yuji Uema, and Kai Kunze. 2019. EyeWear
2019: Third Workshop on EyeWear Computing - Focus: Social Interactions.
In Adjunct Proceedings of the 2019 ACM International Joint Conference on
Pervasive and Ubiquitous Computing and the 2019 International Symposium
on Wearable Computers (UbiComp/ISWC ’19 Adjunct), September 9–13, 2019,London, United Kingdom. ACM, New York, NY, USA, 3 pages. https://doi.
org/10.1145/3341162.3347761

1INTRODUCTION

The face is the main way in which we express personality and character, and is crucial to our ability to interact socially. It holds mostof our senses - sight, hearing, taste, smell - and through nonverbal
gestures, like facial affect and eye gaze, it allows us to communicate
with others. Head and face are an obvious choice to place sensors
and actuators to track activities, enable new user interactions, andstudy social interactions [1, 6].
For a long time, head- and face-based wearables have been restricted to special purpose, niche applications. While hearing aids
and mobile headsets are widely accepted as head-worn devices,
users in public spaces often consider novel head-attached sensors
and devices as uncomfortable, irritating, or stigmatizing. Yet, given
a number of recent technological developments, we believe eyewear
computing will soon transition into mainstream technology andbecome a prominent research field. In essence, because the face is
so important to humans, under every day circumstances people
are highly sensitive to ergonomic and social acceptance aspects ofanything placed there. It is telling that in early wearable computing
ergonomic studies the head was not even included [2]. Early egocentric vision devices were rather bulky, expensive, and their battery

UbiComp/ISWC ’19 Adjunct, September 9–13, 2019, London, United Kingdom

life severely limited their usage [4]. Building on existing work inwearable computing, recent commercial egocentric vision devices
and mobile eye trackers, such as Google Glass, SMI ETG, and J!NS
meme, pave the way for a new generation of "Smart Eyewear" thatis light-weight, low-power, convenient to use, and increasingly
looks like ordinary glasses adding to its unobtrusiveness [3, 5, 8].
This workshop is motivated by the observation that, througha combination of consumer attitude shifts and technological advances, complex head/face-based sensing/interaction is becoming
more feasible for use in every-day situations, and across multiple
users. Recently, eyewear computing has begun to move towards
commercial applications with viable products (see Figure 1). Advances in real-life tracking of physical and cognitive activities andstates (e.g. reading, walking, detection of fatigue, cognitive load)
enable applications on areas like quantified self for the mind [7, 8].
And with increasing ubiquity of the technology, new opportunitiesarise for applications that track social behaviours and interactions
between groups of people in real-world settings [9]. The workshop
is a continuation of the first two EyeWear workshops at UbiComp(2016 in Heidelberg, and 2018 in Singapore). These two workshops
focused mostly on enabling technology. We will still discuss enabling sensors and actuators, yet in contrast to 2016/2018, we will
focus more on application scenarios and creating the academic andcorporate connections for an open eyewear platform to foster exchanges in sensing, interaction, hardware and software know-how.

2TOPICSAs Smart Eyewear can be a powerful enabling technology for abroad range of research fields, we plan to tackle the following topics
during the seminar with a special focus on forming a community
to exchange hardware designs, requirements, best practices andsource code to build and run Smart Eyewear prototypes. The areasof interest include:
Novel application cases: Which activities are the most usefulfor application cases that have the most impact on society. What are
the best application fields to apply Smart Eyewear for the strongest
social impact?
Suitable Sensing and actuation technologies: Driven by theapplication cases, which sensing modalities are the most interesting
to be integrated in Smart Eyewear? What are the important activities and measures to focus on (e.g. fatigue detection, concentrationtracking)?
Impact and perils of long-term sensing: How can we use
these real life recordings of physical, physiological and cognitive
signals on the head? What are potential negative effects of longterm usage, ranging from perceptual issues regarding the use ofwearable displays to potential skin irritations during the deployment of electrodes or other sensors necessary to touch the skin.
Towards an Open Eyewear Platform: How can we build up
an international community to share scientific results and work
together on topics related to Smart Eyewear. Especially large scale,
long-term monitoring of cognitive capacities, promises to havea strong impact on psychology, sociology, and cognitive science.
Eyewear computing can be an enabling technology to transformthese domains from model- to rather data-driven sciences utilizing
real world setups instead of controlled laboratory settings.

Tag, et al.

3

ACTIVITIESWe propose a one-day workshop on the 9th September with presentation sessions in the morning, development of scenarios in theearly afternoon, and group discussions on fundamental challenges
in the late afternoon. In the following we describe pre-workshop
preparations and the post-workshop follow up.

3.1

Presentations

The workshop will start with an introduction and the keynote to
the workshop topic (10:00-12:30), followed by short introductory
presentations to get familiar with the participants and the topics
they are working on. A keynote will be given by Daniel C. Richardson. Daniel is Professor of Experimental Psychology at University
College London (UCL), where he heads up the EyeThink lab. He
researches the social grounding of many cognitive processes, witha particular expertise on the role of gaze. Authors will get 5 minutes to present their work keeping presentations short and focused.
While listening to the presentations, all participants will be asked
to take notes on provided Post-Its, which we will share on a large
whiteboard in order to prepare for the discussion sessions. The
presentation session will be broken into two parts with a shortcoffee break in between. This will allow enough time to discussdifferent ideas coming out from the presentations.

3.2

Demonstration Session

We encourage participants to demonstrate research prototypes
related to their submissions. Depending on the number of demonstrations we will hold a separate session or do small show-and-tellsin the coffee breaks.

3.3

Scenario Development

After the presentations, grouped participants will develop newscenarios. All participants will write notes on Post-Its, which will
be added to the Post-Its from the morning session on the whiteboard.
In order to sort out the challenges and opportunities for an OpenEyewear Platform, we will create an affinity diagram analysis of
the Post-Its. Group analysis will start at 15:00 and will end at 15:30.

3.4

Group Discussion

After the group analysis, we will have a longer coffee break (15:3016:00) followed by a discussion round on identified challenges andopportunities (16:00-17:00). Organizers will actively engage withthe audience to stimulate discussions. We will summarize the key
experiences from the workshop and will plan follow up activities(17:00-17:30).

3.5

Post-Workshop Follow UpOrganizers will document the outcome of the above analysis, andmake this information available to the all participants througha shared Google Drive folder. Participants will be invited to an
existing Slack channel where they can share papers relevant to theworkshop themes.

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EyeWear 2019: Third Workshop on EyeWear Computing

4

ORGANIZERSBenjamin Tag is an early carrier researcher at the Keio University
Graduate School of Media Design. His work focuses on cognitive
state assessments through monitoring physiological signals on theface. He works on Smart Eyewear with a focus on fatigue andcognitive load detection in everyday situations and on creating
feedback loops for responsive media using head worn sensing.
Jamie A Ward is a lecturer at Goldsmiths, University of London.
He works on wearable computing, with contributions to topics likeactivity recognition, performance evaluation, and applications toreal-world problems in health, industry, and the arts.
Yuji Uema is a researcher at JINS Inc., where he develops smart
eyewear and conducts feasibility studies with special focus on HCI,education and medical application. His Ph.D. research at The University of Tokyo includes the analysis and estimation of cognitive
load based on eye blinks and eye movement.
Kai Kunze is a Professor at Keio University Graduate School ofMedia Design. His major research contributions are in pervasive
computing with a focus on augmenting human abilities

5ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS

This workshop is based on a Dagstuhl Seminar on EyeWear Computing No. 16042 http://www.dagstuhl.de/16042, and provides a618

UbiComp/ISWC ’19 Adjunct, September 9–13, 2019, London, United Kingdom

continuation to the successful workshops on Eyewear from theyears 2016 and 2018. This work is also partly supported by JST
CREST Grant No. JPMJCR16E1 and JSPS Grant No. 18H03278, aswell as the Osaka University Grand Challenge Society 5.0.

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