This paper presents novel software techniques for binocular eye tracking within Virtual Reality and discusses their application to aircraft inspection training. The aesthetic appearance of the environment is driven by standard graphical techniques augmented by realistic texture maps of the physical environment. The user's gaze direction, as well as head position and orientation, are tracked to allow recording of the user's fixations within the environment. Methods are given for (1) integration of the eye tracker into a Virtual Reality framework, (2) stereo calculation of the user's 3D gaze vector, (3) a new 3D calibration technique developed to estimate the user's inter-pupillary distance post-facto, and (4) a new technique for eye movement analysis in 3-space. The 3D eye movement analysis technique is an improvement over traditional 2D approaches since it takes into account the 6 degrees of freedom of head movements and is resolution independent. Results indicate that although the currentsignal analysis approach is somewhat noisy and tends to underestimate the identified number of fixations, recorded eye movements provide valuable human factors process measures complementing performance statistics used to gauge training effectiveness.
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