Attention of Many Observers Visualized by Eye Movements

Interacting with a group of people requires to direct the attention of the whole group, thus requires feedback about the crowd’s attention. In face-to-face interactions, head and eye movements serve as indicator for crowd attention. However, when interacting online, such indicators are not available. To substitute this information, gaze visualizations were adapted for a crowd scenario. We developed, implemented, and evaluated four types of visualizations of crowd attention in an online study with 72 participants using lecture videos enriched with audience’s gazes. All participants reported increased connectedness to the audience, especially for visualizations depicting the whole distribution of gaze including spatial information. Visualizations avoiding spatial overlay by depicting only the variability were regarded as less helpful, for real-time as well as for retrospective analyses of lectures. Improving our visualizations of crowd attention has the potential for a broad variety of applications, in all kinds of social interaction and communication in groups.