Eye Tracking

Eye tracking measures the movement of your eye and the point of gaze relative to your head. There is technology available that can track your eye movements using a camera through a computer. This is used in psychology, and for market research and to determine which layouts and designs for web pages attract more views and hold people's attention for longer.
EyeTracking is able to deliver accurate statistics on where and how people are looking at dynamic media. Applications include in-game advertising effectiveness, TV commercial evaluation, and sporting event sponsorship measurement. Information delivered shows not just that an ad appeared on screen (‘air-time’) but actually answers the real question of – “how many people actually saw my ad?”

Some problems with the accuracy and relevance of the results from the eye tracking studies are the knowledge the person has before had, or if they have been asked to complete a specific task when looking at the images.

In this example, the Russian psychologist Yarbus who was studying eye movements of people in the 1950's and 60's discovered that if the viewer is asked a specific question then their eyes concentrate on that part of the image, and that when observing a face your gaze tends to jump between the mouth and eyes.

Found a site that uses the eye tracking progam to generate painterly looking pictures from photographs. The pieces of the picture that you look at more appear to be more in focus, see pictures below.









The white circles on the first picture shows where the gaze of the eye was fixed, and the size of the circle indicates the duration of fixation (The scale on the bottom left corner of the first picture is one second). Interesting that the points you focus on become the only points in focus. I would love to use this eye tracking program to draw with, or to do some sort of social experiment or a work that people could interact with.