The students here at Shanghai Jiao Tong university use some sophisticated hardware/software to track a user’s eyes.
I’m not an HCI expert by any means, but I have seen/heard of quantitatively based user interaction studies (with large sample sizes) for enterprise level websites and eCommerce applications.
But I have not come across the use of these eye-tracking tools for design research in the built environment or spaces. The tools enabled Ms. Dai’s class to glean insights about wayfinding on the Shanghai subway system for a project the students did recently. This could be a really useful tool, especially if it were combined with unintrusive data gathering. And by unintrusive, I don’t mean walking around with this on your head. Wired has a recent article about how billboards might start tracking eyeballs. Scary, but powerful stuff.
If I haven’t mentioned it before, I’m really excited to work with the Jiao Tong students. We certainly have a lot to learn from each other.
Hi!
Interesting stuff this eyetracking, right?
I’m doing a MBA course here in Oxford and are thinking with one other guy from my course here to see if something could be done to ‘unintrusive data gathering’ to quote your blog.
We’ll have a full-time project going over the summer to figure out how eyetracking data should be packaged so that designers could make best use of it.
Would be nice to have a chat over Skype, MSN, Phone, email - whichever you prefer.
You have my email from ‘required field’, right?
Bestest
Mihkel