Slippage of head-worn glasses during real-world behavior: an examination, dataset and testing protocol

Wearable eye trackers and other glasses move on the wearer’s face. Such slippage can cause large offsets in the reported gaze position, and significant data loss. How much slippage may be expected during natural behavior? Here we report on the movement of two eye trackers and two smart glasses on the wearer’s head, recorded using a motion capture setup while thirty-five participants performed ten tasks. Across tasks, average slippage ranged between 0.26–4.05 mm and 0.10–1.81 deg. Slippage differed between tasks, but not headsets. We make the slippage data openly available to inform wearable designers of the nature of slippage to which their devices should be robust. Furthermore, we discuss and critically evaluate a proposed three‑task testing battery designed to approximate real‑world slippage. We hope that this work presents a significant step forward towards the design of robust wearable eye trackers that can be worn throughout daily life.