Using Eye Tracking Data to Understand Visitors' Behaviour (original) (raw)

Capturing Visitors Gazes- Three Eye Tracking Studies in Museums

The objective of the paper is to share with the wider museum community the results of three different eye-tracking studies that have been conducted at the Indianapolis Museum of Art, The Deutsches Museum in Munich, and the Hatfield Marine Science Center Visitor Center in Newport, Oregon. Topics addressed include: the type of eye tracking equipment used, accuracy levels, technical development needed, possible limitations, as well as insight obtained about visitor gaze and effectiveness of interpretation strategies.

Exploring Visitors’ Visual Behavior Using Eye-Tracking: The Case of the “Studiolo Del Duca”

Journal of Imaging

Although the understanding of cognitive disciplines has progressed, we know relatively little about how the human brain perceives art. Thanks to the growing interest in visual perception, eye-tracking technology has been increasingly used for studying the interaction between individuals and artworks. In this study, eye-tracking was used to provide insights into non-expert visitors’ visual behaviour as they move freely in the historical room of the “Studiolo del Duca” of the Ducal Palace in Urbino, Italy. Visitors looked for an average of almost two minutes. This study revealed which parts of the artefact captured visitors’ attention and also gives interesting information about the main patterns of fruition.

The Embodied Gaze: Exploring Applications for Mobile Eye Tracking in the Art Museum

Visitor Studies, 2020

Recent advances in Mobile Eye Tracking (MET) technology facilitate the investigation of visitors' embodied visual behaviors as they move through exhibition spaces. Our MET-based pilot study of visitor behaviors in an art museum demonstrates the value of MET for identifying 'hotspots' of attention. The study also confirms the occurrence of the movement patterns identified by Eghbal-Azar in non-art museums and demonstrates how two patterns-'the Long Gaze' and 'Reading'-can be usefully described in more detail. To illustrate this, we report on one visitor's experience with a single painting, noting the complex embodied visual behaviors associated with gazing and reading. Our findings allow us to reflect on the potential benefits of eye tracking not only for mapping visitor engagement but also for promoting it. In contrast to art museum installations that use static eye tracking as a form of visitor engagement, we argue that MET applications enable visitors to observe, reflect on, and potentially modify, personal viewing practices.

The museum learning experience through the visitors' eyes: An eye tracking exploration of the physical context

Eye Tracking in Tourism, 2020

Experiences always need to be designed with the visitor in mind. In our society, museums hold a prominent place for human learning and experiences. Museum experiences have become a sophisticated blend of spatial design, exhibit curation and multimedia selection, shaping the overall physical context of the visitor's experience. Driven by the question of how we can create effective visitor learning experiences in contemporary museums, a large-scale mobile eye tracking was conducted. Mobile eye tracking has recently entered tourism research as a novel method to study visitor behaviour in real-life environments and in a non-intrusive manner. The findings reveal that the physical context greatly influences the museum learning experience, and show significant differences in attention and engagement levels across exhibition's elements. The study adds insights on the relationship between visitors' museum learning processes and the physical context, and contributes to the model of contextual learning. Practical implications for museum experience design are offered with regards to spatial experience design and different visitor age segments.

Eye-tracking and learning experience: gaze trajectories to better understand the behavior of memorial visitors

Journal of Eye Movement Research

Eye-tracking technology is increasingly introduced in museums to assess their role in learning and knowledge transfer. However, their use provide limited quantitative and/or qualitative measures such as viewing time and/or gaze trajectory on an isolated object or image (Region of Interest "ROI"). The aim of this work is to evaluate the potential of the mobile eye-tracking to quantify the students’ experience and behaviors through their visit of the "Genocide and mass violence" area of the Caen memorial. In this study, we collected eye-tracking data from 17 students during their visit to the memorial. In addition, all visitors filled out a questionnaire before the visit, and a focus group was conducted before and after the visit. The first results of this study allowed us to analyze the viewing time spent by each visitor in front of 19-selected ROIs, and some of their specific sub-parts. The other important result was the reconstruction of the gaze trajectory thro...

Exploring the potential contribution of mobile eye-tracking technology in enhancing the museum visit experience

An intelligent mobile museum visitors' guide is a canonical case of a context-aware mobile system. Museum visitors move in the museum, looking for interesting exhibits, and wish to acquire information to deepen their knowledge and satisfy their interests. A smart context-aware mobile guide may provide the visitor with personalized relevant information from the vast amount of content available at the museum, adapted for his or her personal needs. Earlier studies relied on using sensors for location-awareness and interest detection. This work explores the potential of mobile eye-tracking and vision technology in enhancing the museum visit experience. Our hypothesis is that the use of the eye tracking technology in museums' mobile guides can enhance the visit experience by enabling more intuitive interaction. We report here on satisfactory preliminary results from examining the performance of a mobile eye tracker in a realistic setting – the technology has reached a reliable degree of maturity that can be used for developing a system based on it.

Understanding Museum visitors’ experience through an Eye-tracking study and a Living Lab approach

2016 International Conference on Engineering, Technology and Innovation/IEEE lnternational Technology Management Conference (ICE/ITMC)

User-centered and participatory innovation practices like Living-Labs are nowadays increasingly been used to integrate, design and improve users' experience (UX) in different fields. These methods that had emerged from web and mobile design fields can contribute to the UX in several other fields. Museum visitors experience is a field that can benefit from them. The purpose of this paper is to contribute to the understanding of the museum visitors' experience through the use of tools from UX and usability studies. Among those techniques, field trials studies can help to better understand users' preferences as experience is tested in a real life setting. Exposition curators and managers can then use these understandings to improve visitors' experience. We present a study held at the Museum Aquarium of Nancy-MAN (France). In this study, were evaluated visitors' preferences among four different information supports in an exhibition module using a protocol that combines eyes tracking and an after use survey. Results show that interactive supports, as tablets and screens, even if not preferred by the majority of participants, once engaged with these supports, they interact longer time. Found evidence let us conclude that supports that are different and uncommon are preferred by most of the participants but, they don't keep them engaged for a long time.

Distribution of attention in a gallery segment on the National Socialists’ Führer cult: diving deeper into visitors’ cognitive exhibition experiences using mobile eye tracking

Museum Management and Curatorship, 2019

Mobile eye tracking recordings of 20 visitors of the gallery section 'Der Führer' of the Dokumentation Obersalzberg (Germany) were analyzed to determine the distribution of the visitors' attention on a detailed level of individual exhibition elements consisting of single objects, pictures, texts, and labels. It was found that most of these elements were only briefly scanned but with a substantial variability in gaze behavior both across participants and exhibition elements. In particular, the objects and pictures primarily attracted the visitors' attention but did not necessarily lead to elaborate inspection. In contrast, the information texts were less often noticed by the visitors, but if they were noticed, the visitors tended to spend substantial time reading them. The study demonstrates that notwithstanding methodological drawbacks such as the lack of unobtrusiveness of recording or highly timeconsuming coding of raw data, mobile eye tracking allows to analyze visitors' attention in a gallery with unprecedented precision.

Mobile Eyetracking of Museum Learning Experiences

Rainoldi, M., Neuhofer B. and Jooss, M. (2018) Mobile eyetracking of museum learning experiences. In Stangl, B., Pesonen, J. (Eds.), Information and Communication Technologies in Tourism 2018. Cham, Springer, 473-485., 2018

Eyetracking research has gained traction in a wide range of contexts and finds increasing application in the travel and tourism domain. Whilst there exists some empirical evidence of eyetracking in tourism, most research to date is restricted to lab environments and desktop computers, or occurs on a small scale. This paper presents a first large-scale mobile eyetracking study through a multiple-stage research design that focuses on the visitor's interactive learning experience in a real-life museum context. Based on an emic visitor perspective, the findings unlock insights into a range of factors that shape the physical context of the museum learning experience. This study makes a theoretical contribution and offers methodological advances to eyetracking research and museum interactive learning experiences. Strategic implications for research and practical recommendations for experience design in a museum are offered.

Automatic Analysis of Eye Tracking Data for Augmented Reality Applications: A Prospective Outlook

Eye tracking technology is becoming easier and cheaper to use, resulting in its increasing application to numerous fields of research. Recent years have seen rapid developments in this area. In light of the foregoing, in the context of Cultural Heritage (CH), the definition of a modern approach to understand how individuals perceive art is challenging. Despite the art perception is highly subjective and variable according to knowledge and experience, more recently, several scientific study and enterprises started to quantify how subjects observe art by the application of the eye-tracking technology. The aim of this study was to understand the visual behaviour of subjects looking at paintings, using eye-tracking technology, in order to define a protocol for optimizing an existing Augmented Reality (AR) application that allows the visualiza-tion of digital contents through a display. The stimuli used are three famous paintings preserved at the National Gallery of Marche (Urbino, Marche Region, Italy). We applied eye-tracking to have a deeper understanding of people visual activities in front of these paintings and to analyse how digital contents eventually influence their behaviour. The description of the applied procedure and the preliminary results are presented .