Look into my eyes, baby — Eye-tracking 101
Today, we dive into the topic of eye-tracking — it’s referring to a technology tracking and measuring where you look. Eyetracker equipment is meant to observe and record the position of your eyes and your pupils and then follow the movements they make.
Eye-tracking follows your gaze points — the points that catch the attention of your eye. If you stare at a certain point long enough, it becomes a fixation. The target you are to look at while your view is being tracked is commonly separated into multiple areas of interest. These areas are then compared to each other and judged by analyzing your gaze points, their duration, and frequency — here, one commonly uses heatmaps to visualize the results.
What does one even use eye-tracking for?
This technology mostly finds its purpose in the realms of various research topics, ranging from psychology to track and calculate what attracts and keeps people’s attention — many of the rules of attention, and customer psychology concepts are based, or backed, by eye-tracking research. This has a noticeable overlap with marketing, as understanding how to best allure your customers requires a clear-cut understanding of what they want to see. Being able to tell which kind of packaging, color, font, and general presentation draws in the most, and the most positive attention.
Understanding what pulls your gaze has more benefits than just marketing and customer psychology though — it can often help diagnose some neurological disorders, and is thus helping with healthcare, creating optimal patient care.
So how exactly does eye-tracking follow your gaze?
The eye-trackers are composed of two different parts. Infrared light sources are the first part, and the cameras implemented are the second. The device sends out infrared lights towards your eyes — these lights bounce off your irises and your pupils, creating reflection patterns to be picked up by the camera. The camera records your eye with the bounced off reflections, tracking and saving everything — an image processing algorithm is using these reflections to then accurately calculate the very center of your pupil, allowing it to trace your gaze perfectly. This data is then quantified, and put into heatmaps or other visualization tools so that it can be analyzed with ease.
There’s a reason as to why it’s infrared lights, too. They are more insightful and powerful, as normal light enters your pupil and is swallowed by the darkness, whereas infrared still manages to bounce off of them. To top that off, they are also both less distracting, and less intrusive, as your naked eye can’t perceive them.
Now, of course, there is more than one way to eye-track, and depending on what you are looking at, there are different gadgets that will help you reach your goal.
The two kinds of eye-tracking: Remote & Mobile
There are two main different kinds of eye-trackers. The first, and more commonly used one, would be a remote eye-tracker. These trackers will be stationary, fixed onto a desktop or screen, in order to track your looks on a monitor, showing how you interact with what you perceive on a screen. Its tracking abilities are clearly limited to the screen that you are to interact with, but it offers unrestricted freedom of movement and delivers precise results — as long as you sit next to the screen and keep your eyes on the prize (or rather, your screen), your vision will be analyzed. Naturally, this method records eye movement from a distance and fits best with screen-based stimuli.
Aside from following and analyzing your gaze points for research purposes, this tech can also be used to offer an alternative to the classic mouse you’d typically use for a PC. This can help alleviate wrist pain for people suffering from that, help with focus, and in general raise the accessibility for all, allowing people with disabilities to use PCs with much more each than they would with a mouse.
On the other side, there are mobile eye-trackers. These are mounted lightweight (almost) glasses, that allow you to walk around freely and track your vision regardless of what the target of it is. It helps track objects, or task performance, in a more all-encompassing real-life experience, offering a clearer insight into your full vision. Mounted eye-trackers also offer a more comprehensive insight into the usability of products.
Regardless of which you may choose, as powerful as eye-trackers are, they can’t read your emotional reaction to whatever you look at. So whether or not your attention is overwhelmingly positive or negative, remains to be analyzed by something, or someone else. But more often than not, the purpose of it all is simply to grab attention, at whatever cost — they say bad press is better than no press, don’t they? Well, it’s the same with attention.
