What does eye tracker do?
Eye tracking is a sensor technology that makes it possible for a computer or other device to know where a person is looking. An eye tracker can detect the presence, attention and focus of the user. It allows for unique insights into human behavior and facilitates natural user interfaces in a broad range of devices.
Eye Tracking allows brands/agencies to monitor what people do with their eyes, including what they choose to look at, what directional path they choose to look at, how frequently they saw specific sections.
What is Webcam Eye Tracking?
Webcam Eye Tracking is detecting an individual’s gaze location using a webcam rather than a real eye tracker with infrared illuminators. It doesn’t require sophisticated equipment and the participants do not have to get to a lab. They can do it remotely behind their screens only with a webcam and good internet connection.
Software based eye-tracking typically relies on explicit calibration to develop a self-learning model that relies on user gaze location in coordination with the calibration mechanism.
What is eye tracking used for?
Eye tracking is used across a range of different research fields, and for various different applications within the commercial realm too.
Obtaining detailed information about where an individual or group of people look is useful in a range of contexts, from psychological research, to medical diagnosis, neuromarketing applications and beyond.
Eye tracking is a technology that makes it possible for a computer to know where a person is looking. An eye tracker can detect the presence, attention and focus of the user. It allows for unique insights into human behavior and facilitates natural user interfaces in a broad range of devices.
Eye tracking can be used to answer two types of questions. First, where the eyes are looking is a strong indicator of what a person is thinking about. This is, eye movements reflect attention. This is because we only get good visual information from the location we are looking directly at; our peripheral vision is blurry, but our central vision is crisp and detailed. So, if we want more information, we look directly at something. Knowing where someone is looking tells us a lot about what they are paying attention to.
Eye tracking is useful when studying a person’s gaze behavior, visual attention span. Eye movement data offers a way to trace what the eyes are looking at, how we visually explore stimuli, when and why eyes become fixated on an object, and more.
Tracking eye positions and eye movements offer unique insights into a person’s attention, focus, emotional state, mental engagement and cognitive functions.
Can also be used to operate an onscreen mouse, keyboard and even wheelchairs with just the eyes. Eye movement recordings are translated into mouse commands, enabling touchless interaction with a device.
Eye Tracking technology has been in use for over twenty years primarily for research oriented towards medical diagnostics. Over the past 10 years, Eye Tracking technology has been widely used to measure the efficacy of marketing creatives and in UX research.
What is Gaze Fixation
If a gaze point is maintained for a duration, it becomes a fixation, a period in which our eyes are locked towards a specific object.
What is Areas of interest (AOI)
To concentrate the analysis on specific regions on the stimulus, an AOI can be defined – this is a region which can then be compared against other AOIs if desired.
What is Heatmap?
A heatmap is a visualization of fixation positions over time as an overlay on a specific stimulus. These can be aggregated to compare across groups, or compared across participants.
Eye tracking heatmap gathers and visualizes data about the most and least attention capturing sections and elements of a stimulus/experience. Data is gathered on how many times a visitor looks at individual elements and on visitors' fixation length, which is then plotted in the form of an eye tracking heatmap.
Time To First Fixation (TTFF)
the time between stimulus onset and the viewing of a defined region provides information about when a particular AOI is first seen. This can be informative for assessing what is attended to (and what isn’t) in a visual scene.
What browsers can participants use on their PC to take part in webcam eye tracking?
Supported browsers: Chrome 53+ | Edge 12+ | Firefox 42+ | Opera 40+ | Safari 11+
Are there any specific requirements about the participants' webcam to allow them to participate in webcam eye tracking?
No. The participant must simply have a webcam connected to their PC and allow access to their webcam for the eye-tracking task.
Does your software work with specific Survey Platforms?
The software works with any survey software that is able to pass a participant out to an external URL and receive them back again. If required, eye square can assist you with scripting and setting up a survey using our own survey software which includes this link to the webcam eye tracking task.
Can you provide data for individual participants that I can tie back to my survey data?
Yes, we can provide the respondent level eye and click-tracking data along with aggregated data for the total sample.
How accurate is the webcam eye tracker?
GazeCloud API accuracy ~1.0 deg , precission ~0.2 deg of visual angle
Does webcam eye tracking work on mobile devices?
Yes, It works on mobile devices, laptops and PCs
Can I test live websites?
Yes, you can test live websites with no need to include any scripts or code on the tested websites. Just prowide URL adress of any HTML webpage.
Can the eye tracker work with glasses or contacts? Or are there other things that make the eyes hard to track?
The eye tracker can usually work even if the participant is wearing glasses, although very strong prescriptions, glasses with strong anti-glare coating, and bi-focals present problems. Contacts also do not usually present a problem
How dose calibration work?
The accuracy and precision of eye tracking data depends on a successful calibration. Calibrating an eye tracker is an easy task that takes less than 2 minutes.
The calibration procedure measures your eye position and maps eye movements to targets with a known position.The calibration is done by following a point across the screen
What is the operating distance of the eye tracker?
GazeCloud Eye-Tracker works at a distance of 40 – 95 cm
What happens if the participant looks away from the screen?
Blinking and looking away from the computer screen is ok, because the gaze tracker re-tracks the eyes very fast, when the participant looks back on to the screen and her/his eyes re-appear in the tracker’s field of view.
Why is Webcam Eye Tracking important?
Webcam-based eye tracking making eye tracking a universal technology. An affordable technology which all devices with embedded cameras can support. In fact, today, almost every mobile device and PC is embedded with a camera. In the case of academic or commercial research, this technology has the potential to gather visual attention data of almost every population, cheap and fast – just like giving out an online survey.
How does Webcam Eye Tracking work?
Gaze tracking involves estimating where a person is looking on a screen based on face images from a computer-facing camera.Webcam eye-tracking utilizes an inbuilt or external camera affixed on a monitor or laptop to collect data on where a person is looking. This method doesn’t use specialized cameras or infrared beams, but rather it uses the image produced from the webcam. An algorithm is then employed to calculate the exact position of the head and eyes, and eye direction is correlated to the image on the screen.
Software based eye-tracking typically relies on explicit calibration to develop a self-learning model that relies on user gaze location in coordination with the calibration mechanism.