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Don’t Wanna Miss A Thing

Contributors:

Mohammed Ahmed, Benedict Leung, Mariana Shimabukuro, Christopher Collins

Watching subtitled videos in a foreign language requires constant attention. If you look away, you lose the plot. To solve this, a gaze-aware video player that tracks your eyes and automatically deploys catch-up features the moment you get distracted.

Three Intervention Methods

Using eye-tracking technology, the system detects the exact moment a viewer’s attention leaves the screen. When a distraction happens, the player triggers one of three seamless interventions:

  • Pausing: The video pauses the split second you look away and immediately resumes when your eyes return to the screen, ensuring you miss absolutely nothing.
  • Subtitle Stacking: The video keeps playing, but any subtitles you missed remain on the screen and stack on top of one another. When you look back, you can quickly read the backlog to catch up.
  • Audio Dubbing: Instead of stopping the video, the system temporarily switches the audio to an English text-to-speech dub. This allows you to listen to the dialogue while your eyes are busy elsewhere.

The Verdict

While each technique has its own balancing act, the study found that all three methods significantly outperformed the standard video player. Even though actual comprehension scores were similar across the board, viewers vastly preferred the gaze-aware player because it removed the stress and frustration of having to manually rewind after distractions.

What’s Next?

Future works should explore how to expand this technology beyond controlled, single-viewer environments:

  • Mobile & Extended Viewing: Adapting the gaze-aware features for smartphones and longer, multi-tasking binge sessions.
  • Shared Screens: Designing features for group viewing, such as sending missed subtitles to a personal mobile device so the main video doesn’t pause for everyone else in the room.
  • New Languages: Testing different language pairings to see how these catch-up techniques generalize across diverse linguistic backgrounds.

Explore Our Work

Read our paper: https://doi.org/10.1145/3772318.3790867
Project Page: https://vialab.github.io/DontWannaMissAThing
GitHub: https://github.com/vialab/DontWannaMissAThing

Video Presentation

Publications

  • Ahmed, M., Leung, B., Shimabukuro, M., & Collins, C. (2026). Don’t Wanna Miss a Thing: Gaze-Aware Implicit Interventions for Distraction Recovery in Foreign-Language Videos. In Proceedings of the Symposium on Eye Tracking Research and Applications. ACM.

    PDF

    @inproceedings{ahmed2026dontwannamissathing,
    author={Mohammed Ahmed and Benedict Leung and Mariana Shimabukuro and Christopher Collins},
    title={Don’t Wanna Miss a Thing: Gaze-Aware Implicit Interventions for Distraction Recovery in Foreign-Language Videos},
    year={2026},
    publisher = {Association for Computing Machinery},
    address = {New York, NY, USA},
    url = {https://doi.org/xxxxxxxxxx},
    doi = {10.1145/xxxxxxxxxx},
    booktitle={Proceedings of the 2026 Symposium on Eye Tracking Research and Applications},
    series={ETRA ’26},
    }