Abstract
The concept of using eye-tracking in virtual reality for education has been researched in various fields over the past years. With this review, we aim to discuss the recent advancements and applications in this area, explain the technological aspects, highlight the advantages of this approach and inspire interest in the field. Eye-tracking has already been used in science for many decades and now has been substantially reinforced by the addition of virtual and augmented reality technologies. The first part of the review is a general overview of eye-tracking concepts, technical parts, and their applications. In the second part, the focus shifted toward the application of eye-tracking in virtual reality. The third part, first the description of the recently emerged concept of eye-tracking in virtual reality is given, followed by the current applications to education and studying, which has not been thoroughly described before. We describe the main findings, technological aspects, and advantages of this approach.
Highlights
Eye-tracking is a technology that has for a long time been used in the humanitarian, language (Kaushanskaya and Marian, 2007; Suvorov, 2015; Aryadoust and Ang, 2019), medical research (Pernice et al, 2014; Rigby et al, 2020), and quite recently it has found its way into the field of user experience design
There has been extensive research and many review papers on the topic of eye-tracking technology in various education areas, the concept of eye-tracking in virtual reality for educational purposes is a rather new direction that has only appeared in the last few years
The attention of the students can be measured as described by Yoshimura et al (2019) where the study shows the development of attention-restoring visual signals for displaying when gaze tracking detects that students’ attention is shifting from important objects since in educational virtual reality it is important to solve the problems of students’ inattention to the presented content (Yoshimura et al, 2019)
Summary
Eye-tracking is a technology that has for a long time been used in the humanitarian, language (Kaushanskaya and Marian, 2007; Suvorov, 2015; Aryadoust and Ang, 2019), medical research (Pernice et al, 2014; Rigby et al, 2020), and quite recently it has found its way into the field of user experience design. A recent review on applications of eye tracking into the digital learning environment (Gorbunovs, 2021) summarized the concept of eye tracking and current challenges in the field that have to be considered when applying eye tracking into the learning environment, such as the cultural background, gender, age, and literacy of the prospective users Another new interesting work published in the special issue dedicated to the Research of Visual Perception in Educational Science (Kaakinen, 2021) indicates issues of the eye tracking research related to the operationalization of the theoretical constructs. There has been extensive research and many review papers on the topic of eye-tracking technology in various education areas, the concept of eye-tracking in virtual reality for educational purposes is a rather new direction that has only appeared in the last few years. The article consists of three parts: a brief overview of eyetracking techniques and application fields with the highlights of major developments, the implementation of eye-tracking in virtual reality in different fields of science, and the description of ongoing new research in the field of eye-tracking in virtual reality and education
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