GaCIT in Tampere, day 4.

A follow up the hands-on session was held by Andrew Duchowski. This time to investigate eye movements on moving stimulo (ie. video clips) A classic experiment from the Cognitive Science domain was used as stimuli (the umbrella woman) It serves as a very nice example on how to use eye trackers in a practical experiment.

The task objective is to either count the passes of the white or black team. The experiment illustrates the inattentional blindness which causes certain objects in the movie to go unnoticed.
More information on the phenomenon can be found in the following papers:

• Becklen, Robert and Cervone, Daniel (1983) Selective looking and the noticing of unexpected events. Memory and Cognition, 11, 601-608.

• Simons, Daniel J. and Chabris, Christopher F. (1999). Gorillas in our midst: sustained inattentional blindness for dynamic events, Perception, 28, pp.1059-1074.

• Rensink, Ronald A. (2000). When Good Observers Go Bad: Change Blindness, Inattentional Blindness, and Visual Experience, Psyche, 6(09), August 2000. Commentary on: A. Mack and I. Rock (1998) Inattentional Blindness. MIT Press.

Defining areas of interest (AOI) often creates the tedious process of keyframing where the object has to be defined in each frame of the video. Automatic matchmoving/rotoscoping software does exists but it often does not perform a perfect segmentation of the moving objects. Dixon et al. have performed research in this area, more information can be found in the following papers:

• Dixon, T.D., Nikolov, S.G. et al. (2006). Scanpath analysis of fused multi-sensor images with luminance change: A pilot study. Proceedings of the 9th International Conference on Information Fusion, Florence, Italy, July 2006.
  
  
• Dixon, T.D, G Nikolov, J Lewis, J. Li, E Fernández, J M Noyes, T Troscianko, D R Bull, C N Canagarajah. Multi-Sensor Fused Video Assessment using Scanpath Analysis. Biologically Inspired Information Fusion (BIIF 2006) WorkshopUniversity of Surrey, UK, 22nd–23rd August 2006.
  

The afternoon was used to participant presentations which covered a rather wide range of topics, visual cognition, expert vs novices gaze patterns, gaze interaction, HCI and usability research.

Day One - Introduction

Today I met up with Kenneth Holmqvist who is the laboratory director of the HumLab at Lund Universtity. Kenneth, who have a long experience in the field, held a course last semester in Eye Tracking Methodology in which I participated as a part of my Masters in Cognitive Science at Lund University

The HumLab, or Humanities Laboratory, is located in the new language and litterature center which was build just a few years ago. The facilities certainly are top-notch. Modern Scandinavian design, high quality materials and have a high technical standard (wireless internet access, access control, perfect climate and air)

The laboratory matches this standard by providing Lund University with advanced technical solutions and expertise. A range of studies takes place here. A perfect home for someone into cognitive sciences including psychology, linguistics and why not Human-Computer Interaction.

My background lies in software development which I previously studied at the Department of Informatics, where I completed a BA in Software Design/Construction. My interest in Cognitive Science and Human Computer Interaction was developed during an EAP exchange to University of California, San Diego in 2006-2007. The blend of Cognition and Neuroscience, understanding of the bits and bolts that enables our perception and behavior combined with novel interface technology and interaction methods is a extremely interesting field. Many thanks to the cog.sci. faculty at UCSD for inspiring classes (Hollan, Boyle, Sereno, Chiba)

Kenneth have pratical experience with a range of eye trackers, they do come in many shapes. (head mounted, high speed, remote) all of which are present in the HumLab. He demonstrated a brand new SMI IView RED remote system connected to a powerful Windows XP machine. This is the setup that I will develop a Gaze Interaction Interface on.

Day one was far from over, lets get started in another post..