What is Eye Tracking?

Eye tracking is the process of measuring where someone is looking, typically including both the point of gaze and the motion of the eye. Eye tracking is more accurately called gaze tracking, because it’s not the eye that’s being tracked as much as the gaze of the eye. Eye tracking is done with an eye tracker.

There are a number of ways of eye tracking. At Mirametrix we use infrared light, which is reflected from the eye and sensed by a camera. The eye tracker uses corneal reflection and the center of pupil as features to track over time. This tells the eye tracker where the eye is looking and tracks how it moves (and how the gaze moves). The advantage of this method is that it’s non-invaside and no device is connected to the subject’s body (unlike a head mounted system for example.)

Eye movement is a combination of fixations and saccades. A fixation is when the eye gaze pauses in a certain spot. A saccade is when it moves to another position. The resulting series of fixations and saccades is called a scanpath. In eye tracking, the fixation is the most important point of data; researchers want to understand where someone is focusing and often for how long.

Eye tracking is used in a wide variety of disciplines including cognitive science, psychology, human-computer interaction, marketing research and medical research. More and more, eye tracking is being used in web and software usability as well as game design. You can get a lot of data from an eye tracker and eye tracking study.

Traditional web usability has been focused on clicking and scrolling patterns, but eye tracking offers even richer data. After all, we look before we click. By measuring only the clicks, there’s the likelihood that you’re missing out on what people were really looking at, whether they took a specific action or not. Eye tracking is being used more and more for web and software usability specifically around usage patterns, branding, online advertising and navigation usability.

In market research, eye tracking is gaining in popularity for media advertisers. It can help identify the best print ads, online ads, commercials, etc. Advertisers can quickly figure out what’s catching people’s attention through eye tracking studies.