VETA: Visual eye-tracking analytics for the exploration of gaze patterns and behaviours

Abstract

Eye tracking is growing in popularity for multiple application areas, yet analysing and exploring the large volume of complex data remains difficult for most users. We present a comprehensive eye tracking visual analytics system to enable the exploration and presentation of eye-tracking data across time and space in an efficient manner. The application allows the user to gain an overview of general patterns and perform deep visual analysis of local gaze exploration. The ability to link directly to the video of the underlying scene allows the visualisation insights to be verified on the fly. The system was motivated by the need to analyse eye-tracking data collected from an ‘in the wild’ study with energy network operators and has been further evaluated via interviews with 14 eye-tracking experts in multiple domains. Results suggest that, thanks to state-of-the-art visualisation techniques and by providing context with videos, our system could enable an improved analysis of eye-tracking data through interactive exploration, facilitating comparison between different participants or conditions, thus enhancing the presentation of complex data analysis to non-experts. This research paper provides four contributions: (1) analysis of a motivational use case demonstrating the need for rich visual-analytics workflow tools for eye-tracking data; (2) a highly dynamic system to visually explore and present complex eye-tracking data; (3) insights from our applied use case evaluation and interviews with experienced users demonstrating the potential for the system and visual analytics for the wider eye-tracking community.