What Is Eye Tracking?
The human gaze is powerful. As we discussed in our last blog post, our eyes can communicate a lot, and the broader community, from marketing firms to healthcare centers, are taking notice. New opportunities to better understand and harness the data inherent in the human gaze are emerging with help from eye-tracking technology, and Gazepoint is dedicated to helping you and your team join the revolution. In today’s post, we offer an introduction to eye tracking, how it works, and the wide range of possible applications. Continue reading to learn more, or get started today with an eye-tracking kit from Gazepoint!
What Is Eye Tracking?
Simply put, eye tracking is the measurement of eye activity. This includes tracking where a user looks, when they blink, how they react to stimuli, and more. The human gaze offers insights into many things, from emotional status to physical health, and eye-tracking technology offers an opportunity to tap into that data source.
How Does Eye Tracking Work?
In most cases, eye tracking depends on a piece of hardware that is connected to a computer and either head-mounted or attached to the computer monitor. A light source – often infrared, for reasons of accuracy – is directed toward the user’s eye. A camera tracks the reflection of light and the movement of visible features of the eye, like the pupil. That data is extrapolated to determine the direction of the user’s gaze and more. This data is, in turn, gathered and interpreted by a software program.
What an Eye Tracker Observes
There are a number of data points that an eye tracker can record. It can observe metrics like the user’s pupil diameter at any given time. Blink tracking is another common feature — you can gather data on the user’s average blink rate, the duration of each blink, and more.
To track a user’s gaze, the system makes a series of observations on the user’s eye movements that are translated into pixel coordinates. This gives you the opportunity to analyze a user’s visual path across a screen and can provide a lot of information. With eye-tracking technology, you can learn what features of an item capture a user’s attention, what features are overlooked, and how their gaze travels from one point to another.
Applications
Most individuals use their eyes constantly, from reading content on a phone or computer screen to looking for hazards while driving. Learning more about how we use our eyes and what captures our attention can benefit almost every field and industry, which is why eye-tracking technology is so quickly gaining popularity.
Marketing
Business’ are always trying to hone their design and marketing techniques to better communicate with their customers, and eye-tracking technology offers an unparalleled opportunity to objectively understand what catches their attention and interest. The field of neuromarketing in particular, which combines marketing and neuroscience to find greater success, has found uses for eye tracking and biometrics data.
Healthcare
Analyzing an individual’s gaze and eye movements actually has broad applications in medical fields as well. This technology can help healthcare professionals diagnose physical issues like glaucoma, and there is promising research that it can help with mental health concerns like autism spectrum disorder as well.
Academics
From classes focused on eye-tracking technology to academic research into the other fields we’ve discussed, Gazepoint eye trackers have found their way into schools and universities. Students can benefit from hands-on experience with research-grade equipment, and classrooms have the opportunity to learn from and work with valuable data.
Human-Computer Interaction
Not only can eye tracking be utilized to gather data, but the technology can also be implemented for hands-free human-computer interaction. New designs with eye trackers have been made for everything from video games to augmentative and alternative communication (AAC) systems.
Invest in Eye Tracking Today with Gazepoint
The goal here at Gazepoint is to help everyone access powerful eye-tracking technology. We offer research-grade eye trackers that are both accurate and affordable, as well as easy to set up and use. You can order your eye-tracking hardware kit with laptop or monitor mounts, and every package includes our API/SDK for simple integration. For everything you need to get started, choose our all-in-one eye-tracking software and hardware package — order yours today!
