Eye Trackers
In my emerging technologies class today we explored the use of an eye-tracking device. Dr. Robert Atkinson is our professor and he received a grant to purchase a unit made by Tobii Technologies
Here’s a picture of the class experience: (sorry it was taken with my camera phone and it’s not the best)
The actual demo of the unit was interesting to see. It has its use in many different arenas. Primarily in the research of HCI and software usage. However, we had a discussion about how it could be used in other educational venues as well. Some of those are:
- Seeing how individuals with reading disorders move their eyes as they scan and try to cognitively process text
- Accurately diagnosing individuals with ADHD
- Seeing how learners trained to read languages using a Romanized font (i.e. for English or Spanish) move to be able to cognitively process other written languages that use different symbols or are more symbolic in nature. (Ancient Egyptian hieroglyphics, or modern Asian languages such as Chinese or Japanese)
Eye tracking works by bouncing infared beams of light off a user’s eyes so that the reflections get fed into a sensor. The special software and hardware can then record and track where someone is looking on a software interface or has their eye focused on instructional media.
It was interesting to see that it didn’t quite work 100% successfully. One of our classmates is Japanese and for some reason her dark eyes couldn’t register on the system. However for everyone else it provided great insight on how software testing can be done using the system. It generated a heat map that showed where subjects focused their gazes on the most.
This sort of reminds me of the heat maps that we used at the CTL to help us in our website. We used a trial of Clickdensity, and it worked just great.
