Analysis of Eye Movements with Eyetrace

Abstract

In the time of affordable and comfortable video-based eye tracking, the need for analysis software becomes more and more important. We introduce Eyetrace, a new software developed for the analysis of eye-tracking data during static image viewing. The aim of the software is to provide a platform for eye-tracking data analysis which works with different eye trackers, offering thus the possibility to compare results beyond the specific characteristics of the hardware devices. Furthermore, by integrating various state-of-the-art and new developed algorithms for analysis and visualization of eye-tracking data, the influence of different analysis steps and parameter choices on typical eye-tracking measures is totally transparent to the user. Eyetrace integrates several algorithms to identify fixations and saccades, and to cluster them. Well-established algorithms can be used side-by-side with bleeding-edge approaches with a continuous visualization. Eyetrace can be downloaded at http://www.ti.uni-tuebingen.de/Eyetrace.1751.0.html and we encourage its use for exploratory data analysis and education.