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Tobii’s Wearable Eye Tracker: Revolutionary or Marketing Hype?

Posted on Jun 29, 2010 | 2 comments

Tobii’s Wearable Eye Tracker: Revolutionary or Marketing Hype?Big news for the eye tracking industry was released yesterday. Tobii Technology announced the launch of their new product, Tobii Glasses™. Positioned as a cost effective tool for consumer behavior research, the wearable system consists of a pair of glasses, a data recording box, and IR markers for designating the Area of Analysis on a store shelf. The press release and the product brochure are packed with sparkly marketing expressions like “revolutionary,” “powerful,” and “state-of-the-art,” but how much of what they say is crafty wordsmithing, and what is actually true about how well the product works?

The press release states that the new system will allow customers to “conduct research in a way that was previously impossible,” but if you look through the Eye Tracking Update blog archives, you can find several posts about consumer behavior studies conducted using wearable, mobile eye tracking devices very similar to Tobii’s new system. There are a few existing companies that have been using mobile eye tracking for consumer research for a long time, such as Applied Science Laboratories (ASL), which claims to be “the authority on mobile eye tracking” for over 30 years. Also, Perception Research Services (PRS), which says it “pioneered” the use of eye tracking for consumer behavior research over 40 years ago. So how can Tobii say its product offers “entirely new possibilities?”

Wearable eye trackers definitely offer more natural, realistic research results than monitor embedded systems which present shopping simulations on a screen. A mobile eye tracking device can be worn as a shopper browses the aisles of an actual store. But even still, how realistic are the results when the subject knows their actions are being observed? The Tobii Glasses™ do, however, appear to be less obtrusive and distracting than other wearable devices on the market. The frames look comparable to regular glasses, and there aren’t any awkward cameras hanging from the top or in front of the eyes.

Tobii will have some advantages over the companies that have been doing this for years. Their data aggregation is completely automated, and the Tobii Studio software used for eye tracking analysis interprets data and displays statistics, reports, and visual representations of results. According to the product description, the key feature of the user-friendly program are “dramatically lower costs per respondent,” which will be an attractive selling point since eye tracking research is notoriously cost-prohibitive. Another advantage is their “global market leader” position, giving them the experience and resources to create and market a commercial product which other companies lack.

If this device is successful, it could promote the widespread use of eye tracking technology as an essential research tool, which will create a lot of opportunities for other players in the field. A commercially available, wearable eye tracking system may be exactly what the eye tracking industry needs to really boost its growth. With the future of the industry possibly depending on it to lead the way, let’s just hope that Tobii isn’t all talk.

TOBII PROVIDES GREATER INSIGHT INTO HUMAN BEHAVIOR WITH LAUNCH OF NEW EYE TRACKING GLASSES

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  6. Eye Controlled Video Games? Better Late Than Never
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  8. Tobii Launches Tobii insight, Now Competing With Customers?
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  • Joakim Isaksson

    Apart from the lower intrusiveness of the design, the key is the automated data aggregation made possible by the IR Markers. For Market Research, it takes mobile eye tracking from useless to useful. Manual coding of gaze videos is far too time consuming to be worth it in this type of research/design testing.

  • http://www.acuity-ets.com Jon Ward

    The Tobii Glasses are a world apart from the existing technology due to several things, some of which you touch upon in your article – some you don’t. Of course with any testing, eye tracking, traditional usability and so on there is always some element of being ‘on trial’ but that is unavoidable. By removing as many of the environmental issues, such as not carrying a laptop on your back (SMI) or having a baseball cap with lenses or cameras attached (all the other systems) you gain more natural behaviour. By removing the camera or lens from the field of view of the participant you again add to a more natural test – and once someone begins a task they soon become comfortable and detached somewhat from the pressures of being ‘tested’. The second innovation is that the software platform used is the same platform as the Tobii remote tracker hardware meaning that there is a smaller learning curve, consistency in testing and also the ability to compare statistical data, performance and visual data on real world objects compared to their ‘on screen’ prototype for example. This is all self contained within the same platform – and we could compare for example brand performance on a web page, print ad, tv advert and also point of sale in a real world test with a few clicks of the mouse. The biggest cost saving for the user, and also the largest innovation is indeed the ability to automate statistical data, visual data and performance of areas using the IR markers. Traditional head mounted trackers would require you to slowly watch through footage and use manual tick charts, or timing, to measure interactions and hit rates on products or areas of interest. For a one hour video – this could be 4 hours +. Tobii Glasses allow you to do that literally at the press of a button. In addition to this the digital nature of the media allows you to instantly jump to areas of the footage where users interacted with the key areas of interest – post testing interviews can then be discussed and ran without the dilemma of searching lots of video on the off chance that the user interacted with the areas we are keen on. There are more unique features to the system – it is an exceptional piece of technology – of course we resell their kit so you may accuse me of bias but the facts of the feature list says it all.