September 3, 2010

Driving Around the Bend: Eye Tracking for Curve Navigation

Twisted road

You've likely seen a car commercial in which the driver is stealthily navigating a rural road with sharp twists and turns. How do they do that? Where do they look? A recent article at Physorg.com notes that it is well documented that when negotiating winding roads, a driver typically looks at a specific and well-defied point on the lane marking. This is known as the tangent point. But new research shows that the further a driver looks ahead, particularly in left-hand curves, wide curves, and when … [Read more...]

Streamlining Digital Archives With Eye Tracking

Digital Record Doctor

Digital archiving is an idea that’s slowly creeping into the workplace and it’s only a matter of time before more professionals, offices, and consumers start making it a part of their daily lives. It’s involved in our daily multi-tasking on the PC to some extent, and depending on your job, you may already be using it. When it comes to the medical industry, it’s really an invaluable idea.Digital archives of biomedical imagery could certainly put the necessary critical information at doctors’ … [Read more...]

Eye Tracking and Usability: Which Metrics Are Valuable?

Multiple Eye Tracking Metrics

A few articles we’ve recently done at Eye Tracking Update have focused on the cost and effectiveness of eye tracking for usability studies. There’s a lot of debate on the subject of course, but assuming you’ve decided that eye tracking works for you, you may be somewhere along the lines of choosing which metrics to use. Or maybe you’re not choosing, but thinking you need to see all of them in order to gain insight into how a user uses a website.Well, as we’ve written in some of our … [Read more...]

Shocking Revelation: Eye Tracking Has Problems

confused

With more than a few articles under our belt on the strengths of eye tracking, we thought it might be interesting to point out some of the limitations of eye tracking. We’ve mentioned in previous posts that eye tracking can provide insight into the usability of a website, but without supplementary effort, the data gleaned from eye tracking is just that – data.Knowing what to do with that data is the key, and there’s not one easy answer for your usability or design problems when it comes … [Read more...]

Eye Tracking Study Looks Into Your Bad Hair Day

bad hair day

We’ve seen a lot of eye tracking studies focusing on first impressions and in individual’s instincts when it comes to determining if someone is, for example, trustworthy, friendly, or even deceptive (see recent posts on eye tracking for suspect lineups in law enforcement). But we have yet to see one as overt, in a superficial way, as in an article posted on Pantene’s website. Of course, Pantene is advertising for their hair products here, but we thought it was interesting nonetheless.In … [Read more...]

What Eye Tracking Reveals About Your Lying Eyes

Lying eyes

Lie detection is a field that, with increasing security controls worldwide, is most certainly growing. A group of educational psychologists are using eye tracking technology in an effort to create a new alternative to polygraph lie detection. Recent research licensed by the University of Utah (where the research is taking place) to Credibility Assessment Technologies is a milestone for the industry and a promising hint of things to come.Credibility Assessment Technologies (CAT) is based in Park … [Read more...]

Using Eye Tracking & Brainwaves to Evaluate Ad Effectiveness

Brainwaves

An Indian research agency is saying that advertisements that tend to fare well in the North of India don’t necessarily do as well in the West. Millward Brown, the agency investigating the topic, is bringing several new tools to its clients – tools that will help to measure the effectiveness of ads and people’s responses to them. The company recently met in Mumbai to discuss ad transference across geographical regions and their findings from using eye tracking and brainwave measurements.A … [Read more...]

Eye Tracking and Style Guides

Where do readers look first

We’re well aware by now that eye tracking studies have given us a good idea of where readers look on a page. It seems like most eye tracking studies – usability wise, anyway – are based around exactly this: where do readers look first. We’ve been following eye tracking news in depth for about a year now, and time after time we see the same results.Gaze maps repeatedly show us that a visitor’s eyes hover in the same areas on a page, and a recent eye tracking study for Yahoo! is consistent … [Read more...]

Avatars and Eye Tracking: Ford Uses Technology to Improve Safety

Human Avatar

Ford Motor Company has been using eye tracking and virtual reality to improve safety in motor vehicles. In an article recently published at AskPatty.com, a website specializing in automotive advice for women, Ford is said to be working with several high-tech labs, taking advantage of virtual reality to help reduce injuries, costs, and strict timelines and eye tracking to detect and prevent drowsy driving.Ford has created two avatars of different sizes, known as “Jack” and “Jill.” Jack … [Read more...]

Moodle Using Eye Tracking to Study Usability and eLearning

Moodles Eye Tracking Problems

Another study using eye tracking we came across at Eye Tracking Update has to do with a program called Moodle, which appears to be an e-Learning (teaching and learning) program used by Austrian students (please correct me if I’m wrong or if you have any more information about the program).Gergely Rakoczi of the Vienna University of Technology set out to study how Moodle’s components and teaching materials are “seen” by various Moodle users. He wanted to study navigation schemes and … [Read more...]