Four CHI 2026 Papers Accepted from Our Research Team
We are delighted to share that our research team has four papers accepted to CHI 2026 (the ACM Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems), including one full paper in the main CHI proceedings and three poster papers in CHI EA.
These papers reflect our continued work on mobile eye tracking, gaze interaction, and human-centred interface design, with a strong focus on making gaze-based systems more practical, reliable, and accessible in real-world settings.
Accepted Full Paper (CHI 2026)
The People’s Gaze: Co-Designing and Refining Gaze Gestures with Users and Experts
This full paper presents The People’s Gaze, a user-centred study on how gaze gestures can be co-designed and refined for real-world interactive systems. Rather than defining gestures purely from a technical perspective, the work brings together both end users and domain experts to shape the design process, helping ensure that the resulting interaction techniques are not only functional, but also intuitive and acceptable in practice.
A key contribution of the paper is its focus on the iterative refinement of gaze gestures. The study explores how candidate gestures can be proposed, evaluated, and improved through structured feedback, revealing the kinds of trade-offs that arise between recognisability, usability, comfort, and social acceptability. This is particularly important for gaze interaction, where seemingly efficient gesture designs may still be difficult to learn, easy to confuse, or uncomfortable to perform in everyday contexts.
By grounding gaze-gesture design in a co-design process, the paper offers both a practical user interface design pathway and broader insights for the HCI community. It contributes evidence on how gaze-based interactions can be systematically developed with stakeholders, and supports the wider goal of making gaze interaction more usable, robust, and deployable beyond laboratory settings.
Authors: Yaxiong Lei, Xinya Gong, Shijing He, Yafei Wang, Mohamed Khamis, Juan Ye
Accepted 3 Poster Papers (CHI EA 2026)
GazeSync: A Mobile Eye-Tracking Tool for Analyzing Visual Attention on Dynamically Manipulated Content
GazeSync introduces a mobile eye-tracking tool designed to support visual attention analysis when content is dynamically manipulated (e.g., scrolling, movement, or interactive changes). The work addresses an important challenge in mobile HCI research by helping researchers study attention in more realistic and dynamic usage scenarios.
Authors: Yaxiong Lei, Rishab Talwar, Shijing He, Xinya Gong, Yuheng Wang, Xudong Cai, Zhongliang Guo, Juan Ye
GazeCode: Recall-Based Verification for Higher-Quality In-the-Wild Mobile Gaze Data Collection
GazeCode proposes a recall-based verification approach to improve the quality of mobile gaze datasets collected in the wild. By supporting better quality control during data collection, this work contributes to more robust and scalable mobile eye-tracking research beyond lab environments.
Authors: Yaxiong Lei, Thomas Davies, Xinya Gong, Shijing He, Juan Ye
TinyGaze: Lightweight Gaze-Gesture Recognition on Commodity Mobile Devices
TinyGaze explores lightweight gaze-gesture recognition for commodity mobile devices, aiming to make gaze interaction more computationally efficient and deployable on everyday hardware. The project supports the development of practical gaze-enabled interaction techniques for mobile applications.
Authors: Yaxiong Lei, Hyochan Cho, Fergus Buchanan, Shijing He, Xinya Gong, Yuheng Wang, Juan Ye
Research Theme and Impact
Together, these four papers span a coherent research direction: bringing gaze interaction from controlled settings into practical, real-world mobile use. They address key challenges in the pipeline, from data quality and analysis tools to efficient interaction methods and user-centred gesture design.
We are grateful to all collaborators and co-authors involved in these projects, and we look forward to presenting this work at CHI 2026.
Full Publication List
- Yaxiong Lei, Xinya Gong, Shijing He, Yafei Wang, Mohamed Khamis, Juan Ye. The People’s Gaze: Co-Designing and Refining Gaze Gestures with Users and Experts. In Proceedings of the 2026 CHI Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems (CHI ’26). Association for Computing Machinery.
- Yaxiong Lei, Rishab Talwar, Shijing He, Xinya Gong, Yuheng Wang, Xudong Cai, Zhongliang Guo, Juan Ye. GazeSync: A Mobile Eye-Tracking Tool for Analyzing Visual Attention on Dynamically Manipulated Content. In Extended Abstracts of the 2026 CHI Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems (CHI EA ’26), Association for Computing Machinery.
- Yaxiong Lei, Thomas Davies, Xinya Gong, Shijing He, Juan Ye. GazeCode: Recall-Based Verification for Higher-Quality In-the-Wild Mobile Gaze Data Collection. In Extended Abstracts of the 2026 CHI Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems (CHI EA ’26), Association for Computing Machinery.
- Yaxiong Lei, Hyochan Cho, Fergus Buchanan, Shijing He, Xinya Gong, Yuheng Wang, Juan Ye. TinyGaze: Lightweight Gaze-Gesture Recognition on Commodity Mobile Devices. In Extended Abstracts of the 2026 CHI Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems (CHI EA ’26), Association for Computing Machinery.