# The People's Gaze: Co-Designing and Refining Gaze Gestures with General Users and Gaze Interaction Experts

arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2603.05513 · HTML: https://mlsanity.com/paper/2603.05513/

## Key facts

- Cited by 2 papers in the map (data through 14 Oct 2026).
- First posted on arXiv 20 Jan 2026.

## Built on by (most cited first, 2 of 2)

- [TinyGaze: Lightweight Gaze-Gesture Recognition on Commodity Mobile Devices](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2604.09658/) (2026)
- [Factor-Informed Uncertainty Distillation for Gaze Estimation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2607.20072/) (2026)

## Abstract (arXiv)

As eye-tracking becomes increasingly common in modern mobile devices, the potential for hands-free, gaze-based interaction grows, but current gesture sets are largely expert-designed and often misaligned with how users naturally move their eyes. To address this gap, we introduce a two-phase methodology for developing intuitive gaze gestures. First, four co-design workshops with 20 non-expert participants generated 102 initial concepts. Next, four gaze interaction experts reviewed and refined these into a set of 32 gestures. We found that non-experts, after a brief introduction, intuitively anchor gestures in familiar metaphors and develop a compositional grammar; i.e., activation (dwell) + action (gaze gesture or blink), to ensure intentionality and mitigate the classic Midas Touch problem. Experts prioritized gestures that are ergonomically sound, aligned with natural saccades, and reliably distinguishable. The resulting user-grounded, expert-validated gesture set, along with actionable design principles, provides a foundation for developing intuitive, hands-free interfaces for gaze-enabled devices.