METHODS OF EYE TRACKING AND PROSPECTS OF USING IT FOR THE TRAINING OF AVIATION MEDICINE SPECIALISTS

PurposeThis paper aims to test the similarity of the results of on-screen eye tracking compared to mobile eye tracking in the context of first fixation location on stimuli.Design/methodology/approachThree studies were conducted altogether with 117 participants, where the authors compared both methods: stationary eye tracking (Tobii Pro X2-60) and mobile eye tracking (Tobii Pro Glasses 2).FindingsThe studies revealed that the reported average first fixation locations from stationary and mobile eye tracking are different. Stationary eye tracking is more affected by a centre fixation bias. Based on the research, it can be concluded that stationary eye tracking is not always suitable for studying consumer perception and behaviour because of the centre viewing bias.Research limitations/implicationsWhen interpreting the results, researchers should take into account that stationary eye tracking results are affected by a centre fixation bias. Previous stationary eye tracking research should be interpreted with the centre fixation bias in mind. Some of this previous work should be retested using mobile eye tracking. If possible small-scale pilot studies should be included in papers to show that the more appropriate method, less affected by attention biases, was chosen.Practical implicationsManagers should trust research where the ability of package design to attract attention on a shelf is tested using mobile eye tracking. The authors suggest using mobile eye tracking to optimise store shelf planograms, point-of-purchase materials, and shelf layouts. In package design, interpretations of research using stationary eye tracking should consider its centre fixation bias. Managers should also be cautious when interpreting previous stationary eye tracking research (both applied and scientific), knowing that stationary eye tracking is more prone to a centre fixation bias.Originality/valueWhile eye tracking research has become more and more popular as a marketing research method, the limitations of the method have not been fully understood by the field. This paper shows that the chosen eye tracking method can influence the results. No such comparative paper about mobile and stationary eye tracking research has been done in the marketing field.

The X-ray screening systems operators’ professional training is based on the CBT (computer-based training) principle, which has algorithms of adaptive training. These algorithms in existing computer simulators include feedback mechanisms on the basis of trainability exponents – such as the frequency of detecting dangerous objects, the frequency of false alarms and detection time. Further enhancement of the operators’ simulator training effectiveness is associated with the integration of psychophysiological mechanisms providing monitoring of their functional state. Based on the analysis of the particularities of x-ray screening systems operators’ professional training associated with the formation of competences in dangerous objects visual search, the most perspective method is the Eye tracking technology. Domestic and foreign studies of the eye movements characteristics while solving professional tasks in training process are actively developed in various areas. There are no studies of visual search peculiarities in domestic practice in contrast to exterior studies. This research is aimed at considering the usage of Eye tracking technology in the training of x-ray screening systems operators. As the result of the experimental research with the use of mobile eye-tracker Sensomotoric Instruments Eye Tracking Glasses 2.0 the statistical data of eye movement parameters of two groups of subjects with different levels of training have been received. The application of cluster and discriminant analyses methods allowed to identify General classes of these parameters, as well as to obtain the discriminants functions for each group under examination. The theoretical significance of the peculiarities of the operators’ eye movement studies is to identify the patterns of prohibited items visual search. The practical importance of implementation of Eye tracking technology and statistical analysis methods is to increase the reliability of assessment the level of formed competence of x-ray screening systems’ operators in visual search, as well as to develop the potential system of operators’ state monitoring and assessing their visual fatigue.

In this chapter we consider why it is important to study eye movements in natural, real world settings and the practical considerations that need to be taken into account when collecting eye movement data in these situations. Conducting a study in a real world environment poses very different challenges than those present in laboratory-based settings. Variables are hard to control and this restricts the kinds of paradigms that can be employed. Thus, careful consideration of the research question and whether it is appropriate for real world study is a necessary first step. Mobile eye trackers are often the most obvious choice for studying eye movements in real world settings. There exists a range of mobile eye tracking systems available to buy, and researchers also build their own mobile eye trackers to solve particular issues. Selecting the right system is an important consideration for mobile eye tracking and in this chapter we will highlight some of the key choices that the researcher should consider when buying or building a mobile eye tracker. Care must be taken to ensure that the data collected are sufficiently reliable to address the research question. While the principles of eye tracking - how we detect features of the eye and use these to estimate where someone is looking - are very similar for all eye trackers, the challenges faced when collecting data in natural settings are far greater than those that face eye trackers in a controlled laboratory setting. We will consider the key threats that real world settings pose for collecting reliable eye tracking data in the hope that we not only raise awareness of these issues but also offer some suggestions for how these can be minimised or at least identified in the data. For those considering whether to run an eye tracking study in the real world, we hope that this chapter will help you as you consider your research questions and choices of mobile eye tracker. For those already committed to studying eye movement behaviour in a real world setting, we hope that our discussion of the problems and possible solutions to the challenges faced in such settings will help minimise data loss from the common challenges that we face when conducting mobile eye tracking studies.

Eye tracking has been used in usability testing for many years to gain objective measurements to inform label, instruction, and product design. With many different testing environments, possible participants, hardware, and software, key metrics can vary greatly. These metrics can also vary for different studies, so a standardized test method, metrics, and calculation method are proposed in this study. The Tobii Pro Glasses 2 is a mobile eye tracker that does not significantly affect user mobility compared to other eye-trackers. This study aims to build a testing method, which can modify to better fit the varying conditions found in usability testing. This study was performed with Tobii Pro Glasses 2; however, this test method can be used with any mobile eye tracking units. Even with poor testing conditions, this test method results in reliable metrics which can be utilized to inform expectation and decisions with eye tracking. These methods are recommended to be performed prior to eye tracking testing to determine testing-specific performance.

Adults aged 65 and older are the fastest growing population demographic. Standard, stationary eye tracking has been used to test for age differences in attention and cognition toward understanding decline trajectories and identifying ways to enhance functioning into late life. More recently, advanced methods of at-home eye tracking, mobile eye tracking, and simultaneous Magnetic Resonance Imaging (MRI) eye tracking have suggested promise for insight into more dynamic and naturalistic processes of visual attentional and cognitive processing as well as their brain correlates in aging. Here, we outline challenges, best practices, and novel frontiers in the use of eye-tracking methodology among older adults. We cover considerations pertaining to optimized age-tailored study designs and procedures, eye-tracker setup as well as data quality and analysis. Throughout, we reflect on our experiences conducting novel experiments via at-home and mobile eye tracking as well as simultaneous MRI-eye tracking in aging populations. We also present empirical data comparing the quality of eye tracking in the behavioral lab vs. the MRI environment among both young and older adults, in support of simultaneous MRI-eye tracking informing brain-behavior links in aging, while acknowledging tradeoffs in data quality of this combined methodology. We propose for future research to leverage these novel, advanced eye-tracking applications for a more comprehensive and real-life capture of attentional and cognitive changes with age.

Wearable mobile eye trackers have great potential as they allow the measurement of eye movements during daily activities such as driving, navigating the world and doing groceries. Although mobile eye trackers have been around for some time, developing and operating these eye trackers was generally a highly technical affair. As such, mobile eye-tracking research was not feasible for most labs. Nowadays, many mobile eye trackers are available from eye-tracking manufacturers (e.g. Tobii, Pupil labs, SMI, Ergoneers) and various implementations in virtual/augmented reality have recently been released.The wide availability has caused the number of publications using a mobile eye tracker to increase quickly. Mobile eye tracking is now applied in vision science, educational science, developmental psychology, marketing research (using virtual and real supermarkets), clinical psychology, usability, architecture, medicine, and more. Yet, transitioning from lab-based studies where eye trackers are fixed to the world to studies where eye trackers are fixed to the head presents researchers with a number of problems. These problems range from the conceptual frameworks used in world-fixed and head-fixed eye tracking and how they relate to each other, to the lack of data quality comparisons and field tests of the different mobile eye trackers and how the gaze signal can be classified or mapped to the visual stimulus. Such problems need to be addressed in order to understand how world-fixed and head-fixed eye-tracking research can be compared and to understand the full potential and limits of what mobile eye-tracking can deliver. In this symposium, we bring together presenting researchers from five different institutions (Lund University, Utrecht University, Clemson University, Birkbeck University of London and Rochester Institute of Technology) addressing problems and innovative solutions across the entire breadth of mobile eye-tracking research.Hooge, presenting Hessels et al. paper, focus on the definitions of fixations and saccades held by researchers in the eyemovement field and argue how they need to be clarified in order to allow comparisons between world-fixed and head-fixed eye-tracking research. - Diaz et al. introduce machine-learning techniques for classifying the gaze signal in mobile eye-tracking contexts where head and body are unrestrained. Niehorster et al. compare data quality of mobile eye trackers during natural behavior and discuss the application range of these eye trackers. Duchowski et al. introduce a method for automatically mapping gaze to faces using computer vision techniques. Pelz et al. employ state-of-the-art techniques to map fixations to objects of interest in the scene video and align grasp and eye-movement data in the same reference frame to investigate the guidance of eye movements during manual interaction.Video stream:https://vimeo.com/357473408

Despite recent developments in eye tracking technology, mobile eye trackers (ET) are still expensive devices limited to a few hundred samples per second. High speed ETs (closer to 1 KHz) can provide improved flexibility for data filtering and more reliable event detection. To address these challenges, we present the Stroboscopic Catadioptric Eye Tracking (SCET) system, a novel approach for mobile ET based on rolling shutter cameras and stroboscopic structured infrared lighting. SCET proposes a geometric model where the cornea acts as a spherical mirror in a catadioptric system, changing the projection as it moves. Calibration methods for the geometry of the system and for the gaze estimation are presented. Instead of tracking common eye features, such as the pupil center, we track multiple glints on the cornea. By carefully adjusting the camera exposure and the lighting period, we show how one image frame can be divided into several bands to increase the temporal resolution of the gaze estimates. We assess the model in a simulated environment and also describe a prototype implementation that demonstrates the feasibility of SCET, which we envision as a step further in the direction of a mobile, robust, affordable, and high-speed eye tracker.

The Customer Experience Management at the Swiss Federal Railways (SBB) experiments with new technologies and methods to capture experiences and perceptions of passengers to design safe and customer friendly environments. First, a new methodological approach based on a mobile application was developed in-house to assess experiences and emotions of rail passengers. Second, to learn more about visual perception in train stations, mobile eye tracking was used. In conclusion, the app proved to be valuable in capturing personal and subjective experiences. Mobile eye tracking helped to assess visual perception of passengers which resulted in further understanding of unique situations or objects which might subconsciously influence the experience of passengers.

The study of eye movement has been last for centuries. Over the past decade, scientists have developed many new eye-tracking methods. During that same period, technological innovations have made eye-tracking units more affordable. The article provides a systematic review on some main eye-tracking methods. This paper also includes the factors that may influence the eye-gaze tracking and the application of gaze estimation in many areas. In this article, we provide information on eye tracking in hopes of improving the quality and reporting of eye-tracking research in communication.

Eye tracking can be applied to a variety of scenarios as a means of measuring visual attention and interpreting visual solution strategies. In this article, we use mobile eye-tracker to collect information to evaluate user satisfaction with the tax service office. Mobile eye tracking can collect precise information concerning the users’ visual attention and interactions in authentic environments. Unlike screen-based eye-tracker using a laboratory or stationary computer, mobile eye tracking also can be used effectively in a walk a round scene where users could walk around and interact with diverse resources. In the progress of eye tracking data analysis, fixations and gaze points, areas of interest (AOIs), heat-maps play an important role. This annotation is typically the most time-consuming step of the analysis process. To reduce processing time and human effort, we introduced the latest computer vision techniques (i.e., You Only Look Once, YOLO) based on a convolutional neural network (CNN) to detect and recognize specific objects in recorded video. We propose a new method to evaluate the user satisfaction of a service system by implicating mobile eye tracker. In addition we gave a new idea of using CNN-based object detection technique to annotate video data collected by mobile eye tracker, which could be followed up for further analysis.

Automatic saliency-based recalibration is promising for addressing calibration drift in mobile eye trackers but existing bottom-up saliency methods neglect user's goal-directed visual attention in natural behaviour. By inspecting real-life recordings of egocentric eye tracker cameras, we reveal that users are likely to look at their phones once these appear in view. We propose two novel automatic recalibration methods that exploit mobile phone usage: The first builds saliency maps using the phone location in the egocentric view to identify likely gaze locations. The second uses the occurrence of touch events to recalibrate the eye tracker, thereby enabling privacy-preserving recalibration. Through in-depth evaluations on a recent mobile eye tracking dataset (N=17, 65 hours) we show that our approaches outperform a state-of-the-art saliency approach for automatic recalibration. As such, our approach improves mobile eye tracking and gaze-based interaction, particularly for long-term use.

This study was based on the concept of teacher professional vision, in which professional reasoning plays a crucial role, and investigated how video with gaze overlay and heatmaps from the mobile eye tracker can support teachers’ professional self-reflection and professional vision development in higher education. Four university teachers wore a mobile eye tracker in a segment of one lecture. Their gaze distribution on classroom targets was analyzed together with their reflective comments when watching the recordings of their own behavior in the lecture. The results showed that mobile eye tracking data provided feedback on the distribution of teacher attention in different areas in the classroom and between students. Visualization of gaze distribution as heatmaps allowed teachers to reflect on how they perceived their gaze allocation and most of them realized that sometimes there was a difference between how they perceived their gaze allocation and how it was captured by the eye tracker. The study revealed where teachers most often diverted their attention, which encouraged them to reflect on why this happened, to think about their professional reasoning, and to analyze opportunities for improvement. Therefore, the heatmap analysis based on the data collected with the mobile eye trackers could be used to develop the professional vision of teachers in different educational contexts for engaging students through more balanced attention to every student in the classroom. Implications for using mobile eye tracker recording and gaze distribution heatmaps in video-based professional development for teachers are discussed.

Exploring the potential of a mobile eye tracker as an intuitive indoor pointing device: A case study in cultural heritage

It is our great pleasure to welcome you to the 1st International Workshop on Pervasive Eye Tracking and Mobile Eye-Based Interaction (PETMEI 2011). Recent developments in mobile eye tracking equipment and automated eye movement analysis point the way toward unobtrusive eye-based human-computer interfaces that will become pervasively usable in everyday life. We call this new paradigm pervasive eye tracking - continuous eye monitoring and analysis 24/7. PETMEI 2011 focuses on pervasive eye tracking as a trailblazer for mobile eye-based interaction and eye-based context-awareness. The workshop provides a forum for researchers and practitioners from context-aware computing, human-computer interaction and eye tracking to share their perspectives on techniques and applications that go beyond classical eye tracking and stationary gaze-based interaction. We want to stimulate and explore the creativity of these communities with respect to the implications, key research challenges, and new applications for pervasive eye tracking. Our international program committee consisted of 15 of the leading researchers in the fields of ubiquitous computing, human-computer interaction, eye tracking as well as experimental psychology. The call for papers attracted 13 submissions - 10 full papers and 3 notes - from Europe, Asia, and the United States. Each submission was reviewed by at least two members of the program committee. Of the 13 submissions, 11 were evaluated by one additional PC member. The PC members provided feedback to the authors through 37 high quality reviews. Based on the reviews and after an online discussion among the organisers, one full paper was downgraded to notes and a total of 10 submissions - 7 full papers and 3 notes - were accepted for publication in these proceedings. This represents an overall acceptance rate of 76.9%. Jeff B. Pelz will give an opening keynote entitled "Semantic Analysis of Mobile Eye Tracking Data" in which he highlights the challenges but also potential solutions for analysing large amounts of eye movement data collected using mobile eye trackers.

Wayfinding system is an interdisciplinary research between the environment design and human interface of information system. The design of EXIT is to efficiently help people to identify the emergency exit when the accident occurred. In this paper, eye tracking techniques are utilized to aided EXIT design in the wayfinding system. The mobile eye tracking was used to collect the human eye movement data in the building where different EXIT designs were displayed. While the stationary eye tracking techniques was used to collect the eye movement data on the same building's EXIT designs on virtual 3D sketches to get the quantitative data comparing with the mobile eye tracker. Finally, some general conclusions were obtained from the views of visual elements selecting, EXIT appearance design and EXIT's placement in the building, which is very valuable and can be commonly referred in wayfinding system. The research methods in the paper is very original and has not been mentioned in other papers of the related fields before, which is well worthy data and empirical methodologies can be introduced in wayfinding and space decision making research.