Abstract
An experiment was conducted to compare museum visitors’ gaze patterns using mobile eye-trackers, whilst they were engaging with a physical and a virtual reality (VR) installation of Piet Mondrian’s Neo-plasticist room design. Visitors’ eye movements produced approximately 25,000 fixations and were analysed using linear mixed-effects models. Absolute and area-normalized dwell time analyses yielded mostly non-significant main effects of the environment, indicating similarity of visual exploration patterns between physical and VR settings. One major difference observed was the decrease of average fixation duration in VR, where visitors tended to more rapidly switch focus in this environment with shorter bursts of attentional focus. The experiment demonstrated the ability to compare gaze data between physical and virtual environments as a proxy to measure the similarity of aesthetic experience. Similarity of viewing patterns along with questionnaire results suggested that virtual galleries can be treated as ecologically valid environments that are parallel to physical art galleries.
Highlights
An experiment was conducted to compare museum visitors’ gaze patterns using mobile eye-trackers, whilst they were engaging with a physical and a virtual reality (VR) installation of Piet Mondrian’s Neo-plasticist room design
A similar inclusive viewpoint argues for influences of both bottom-up and top-down processing on visual attention and attention-related t asks[19,20], which can be linked to eye movements in general, and fixation-related metrics in particular
The concept of attention can be linked to visual perception and more to the visual aesthetic experience[25,26], since it can be described as a mechanism that shapes the information received from the scene, linking theoretical work and empirical findings related to attention into a coherent description is an ongoing c hallenge[27]
Summary
An experiment was conducted to compare museum visitors’ gaze patterns using mobile eye-trackers, whilst they were engaging with a physical and a virtual reality (VR) installation of Piet Mondrian’s Neo-plasticist room design. To further illustrate this research potential, researchers have investigated (1) interaction between gaze patterns and abstract paintings in a gallery[30] and potential implementation of scan path analysis using support-vector machine algorithms to classify paintings based on fixation sequences[31], (2) use of mobile eye-tracking analysis on abstract and representational paintings in a museum[32], (3) effects of bottom-up factors (as indexed by saliency maps derived from paintings) and top-down factors (as manipulated by the information about paintings provided to the participants, who were allowed to view the same paintings again) between children and adults, whilst viewing Van Gogh p aintings[33], (4) interaction between speaking and fixation patterns and various gaze metrics[34], (5) difference in exploration strategies among wheelchair and non-chair users in m useums[35], (6) amount of attentional shift between museum content itself and a supplementary tablet containing information on that content[36], (7) whether fixation duration can predict aesthetic choice37—among others One commonality across these diverse studies is their emphasis on the necessity of fieldwork in empirical aesthetics, aiming to measure aesthetic experience and judgments in genuine settings
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