Abstracts from SWAET 2010

The booklet containing the abstracts for the Scandinavian Workshop on Applied Eye Tracking (SWAET) is now available for download, 55 pages about 1Mb. The abstracts spans a wide range from gaze interaction to behavior and perception. A short one page format makes it attractive to venture into a multitude of domains and acts as a nice little starting point for digging deeper. Shame I couldn't attend, maybe next year. Kudos for making this booklet available.

Title	Authors
Eye movements during mental imagery are not perceptual re-enactments	R. Johansson, J. Holsanova, K. Holmqvist
Practice eliminates "looking at nothing"	A. Scholz, K. Mehlhorn, J.F. Krems
Learning Perceptual Skills for Medical Diagnosis via Eye Movement  Modeling Examples on Patient Video Cases	H. Jarodzka, T. Balslev, K. Holmqvist, K. Scheiter, M. Nyström, P. Gerjets, B. Eika
Objective, subjective, and commercial information: The impact of presentation format on the visual inspection and selection of Web search results	Y. Kammerer, P. Gerjets
Eye Movements and levels of attention: A stimulus driven approach	F.B. Mulvey, K. Holmqvist, J.P Hansen
Player‟s gaze in a collaborative Tetris game	P Jermann, M-A Nüssli, W. Li
Naming associated objects: Evidence for parallel processing	L. Mortensen , A.S. Meyer
Reading Text Messages - An Eye-Tracking Study on the Influence of Shortening Strategies on Reading Comprehension	V. Heyer, H. Hopp
Eye movement measures to study the online comprehension of long (illustrated) texts	J. Hyönä, J.K, Kaakinen
Self-directed Learning Skills in Air-traffic Control; A Cued Retrospective Reporting Study	L.W. van Meeuwen, S. Brand-Gruwel, J.J. G. van Merriënboer, J. J.P.R. de Bock, P.A. Kirschner
Drivers‟ characteristic sequences of eye and head movements in intersections	A. Bjelkemyr, K. Smith
Comparing the value of different cues when using the retrospective think aloud method in web usability testing with eye tracking	A. Olsen
Gaze behavior and instruction sensitivity of Children with Autism Spectrum Disorders when viewing pictures of social scenes	B. Rudsengen, F. Volden
Impact of cognitive workload on gaze-including interaction	S. Trösterer, J. Dzaack
Interaction with mainstream interfaces using gaze alone	H. Skovsgaard, J. P. Hansen, J.C. Mateo
Stereoscopic Eye Movement Tracking: Challenges and Opportunities in 3D	G. Öqvist Seimyr, A. Appelholm, H. Johansson R. Brautaset
Sampling frequency – what speed do I need?	R. Andersson, M. Nyström, K. Holmqvist
Effect of head-distance on raw gaze velocity	M-A Nüssli, P. Jermann
Quantifying and modelling factors that influence calibration and data quality	M. Nyström, R. Andersson,  J. van de Weijer

Eye tracking in the wild: Consumer decision-making process at the supermarket

Kerstin Gidlöf from the Lund University Humlab talks about the visual appearance of consumer products in the supermarket and how the graphical layout modulates our attention. Perhaps the free will is just an illusion, however number of items in my fridge containing faces equals zero. Is it me or the store I'm shopping at?

Scandinavian Workshop on Applied Eye-tracking (SWAET) 2010.

The first call for papers for the annual Scandinavian Workshop on Applied Eye-Tracking (SWAET) organized by Kenneth Holmqvist and the team at the Lund University Humanities laboratory was just announced. The SWAET 2010 will be held in Lund, Sweden between May 5-7th. The invited speaker is Gerry Altmann (blog) from the Dept. of Psychology at University of York, UK and Ignace Hooge (s1, s2) from the Dept. of Psychology at Utrecht University, Holland.

Visit the SWAET website for more information.

Update: Download the abstracts (pdf, 1Mb)

An Adaptive Algorithm for Fixation, Saccade, and Glissade Detection in Eye-Tracking Data (Nyström M. & Holmqvist K, 2009)

From Markus Nyström and Kenneth Holmqvist at the Lund University Humanities Lab (HumLab) in Sweden comes an interesting paper on a novel algorithm that is capable of detecting glissades (aka dynamic overshoot) in eye tracker data. These are wobbling eye movements often found at the end of saccades and has previously been considered errors in saccadic programming with limited value. What ever their function is the phenomena does exists and should be accounted for. The paper reports finding glissades following half of all saccades while reading or viewing scenes, and has an average duration of 24 ms. This is work is important as it extends the default categorization of eye movement e.g. fixation, saccade, smooth pursuit, and blink. The algorithm is based on velocity saccade detection and is driven by data while containing a limited number of subjective settings. The algorithm contains a number of improvements such as thresholds for peak- and saccade onset/offset detection, adaptive threshold adjustment based on local noise levels, physical constraints on eye-movements to exclude noise and jitter, and new recommendations for minimum allowed fixation and saccade duration. Also, important to note that the data was obtained using a high-speed 1250 Hz SMI system, how the algorithm performs on a typical remote tracker running at 50-250Hz has yet to be defined.

• Nyström, M. & Holmqvist, K., "An Adaptive Algorithm for Fixation, Saccade, and Glissade Detection in Eye-Tracking Data", Behavior Research Methods.
  
  
• Download Matlab source code for the algorithm (version 1.0)

Lund Eye-Tracking Academy (LETA)

Kenneth Holmqvist and his team at the Humanities Lab at Lund University, Sweden will host another three day long LETA training course in eye tracking and analysis of eye movement data. This is an excellent opportunity to get hands-on experience using state-of-the art equipment and setting up experiments. The course is held between 23rd-25th September and the registration is open.

Course contents
• Pro and cons of headmounted, remote and contact eye-trackers.
• High sampling speed and detailed precision – who needs it?
• Gaze-overlaid videos vs datafiles – what can you do with them?
• How to set up and calibrate on a variety of subjects on different eye-trackers?
• Glasses, lenses, mascara, and drooping eye-lids – what to do?
• How to work with stimulus programs, and synchronize them with eye-tracking recording?
• How to deal with the consent forms and ethical issues?
• Short introduction to experimental design: Potentials and pitfalls.
• Visualisation of data vs number crunching.
• Fast data analysis of multi-user experiments.
• Fixation durations, saccadic amplitudes, transition diagrams, group similarity measures, and all the other measures – what do they tell us? What are the pitfalls?

Teaching methods
Lectures on selected topics (8h)
Hands-on work in our lab on prespecified experiments: Receiving and recording on a subject (9h). Handson initial data analysis (3h).

Eye-tracking systems available for this training
2*SMI HED 50 Hz with Polhemus Head-tracking
3*SMI HiSpeed 240/1250 Hz
1*SMI RED-X remote 50 Hz
2*SMI HED-mobile 50/200 Hz

Lund Eye Tracking Acadamy

From the Lund Eye Tracking Academy (LETA) comes an excellent text on the more practical aspects of eye tracking in research settings.

"This text is about how to record good quality eye-tracking data from commercially available video-oculographic eye-tracking system, and how to derive and use the measures that an eye-tracker can give. The ambition is to cover as many as possible of the measures used in science and applied research. The need for a guide on how to use eye-tracking data has grown during the past years, as an effect of increasing interest in eye-tracking research. Due to the versatility of new measurement techniques and the important role of human vision in all walks of life, eye-tracking is now used in reading research, neurology, advertisement studies, psycholinguistics, human factors, usability studies, scene perception, and many other fields "

Download the document (PDF, 93 pages, 19Mb)

Lund Eye-Tracking Academy (LETA) June11-13, 2008

SMI and Lund University Humanities Lab in Lund, Sweden, will realize the 1st Lund Eye Tracking Academy (LETA). Hosted by Kenneth Holmqvist and his team, the course will take place on June 11-13, 2008.

"We have decided to start our "eye-tracking academy" to help students, researchers and labs who start with eye-tracking to get up and running, to give them a flying start. Although eye-tracking research can be both fascinating and extremely useful, doing good eye-tracking research requires a certain minimum knowledge. Without having a basic understanding of what can be done with an eye-tracker, how to design an experiment and how to analyse the data, the whole study runs of risk of just producing a lot data which cannot really answer any questions.

Currently, to our knowledge, there exists no recurring and open course in eye-tracking in Europe outside Lund and everybody is trained on a person-to-person level in the existing larger research labs. In Lund, we already hold a 10 week, 7.5 ECTS Master-level course in eye-tracking. Now we offer another course, an intensive 3 day course, open to all interested in eye-tracking, who want to get a flying start and acquire some basic understanding of how to run a scientifically sound eye-tracking experiment and get high quality data that they know how to analyze.

This training course is open for all researchers and investigators just before or in the early phases of using eye-tracking, and for users wanting to refresh their knowledge of their system. It is open for attendees from universities as well as from industry. As part of the course, attendees will work hands-on with sample experiments, from experimental design to data analysis. Participants will train on state-of-the-art SMI eye-tracking systems, but the course is largely hardware independent and open to users of other systems."

Scheduled dates
11-13 June, 2008. Starting at 09:00 in the morning and ending the last day at around 16:00.

Course contents
• Pro and cons of headmounted, remote and contact eye-trackers.
• High sampling speed and detailed precision – who needs it?
• Gaze-overlaid videos vs datafiles – what can you do with them?
• How to set up and calibrate on a variety of subjects on different eye-trackers?
• Glasses, lenses, mascara, and drooping eye-lids – what to do?
• How to work with stimulus programs, and synchronize them with eye-tracking recording?
• How to deal with the consent forms and ethical issues?
• Short introduction to experimental design: Potentials and pitfalls.
• Visualisation of data vs number crunching.
• Fast data analysis of multi-user experiments.
• Fixation durations, saccadic amplitudes, transition diagrams, group similarity measures, and all the other measures – what do they tell us? What are the pitfalls?

Teaching methods
Lectures on selected topics (8h)
Hands-on work in our lab on prespecified experiments: Receiving and recording on a subject (9h). Handson initial data analysis (3h).

Eye-tracking systems available for this training
2*SMI HED 50 Hz with Polhemus Head-tracking
3*SMI HiSpeed 240/1250 Hz
SMI RED-X remote 50 Hz
2*SMI HED-mobile 50/200 Hz

Attendance fee
€750 incl course material, diploma and lunches if you register before June 5th.
We will only run the course if we get enough participants. Register online.

The course content is equivalent to 1 ECTS credit at Master's level or above, although we cannot currently provide official registration at Lund University for this credit.

Interface evaluation procedure

The first evaluation of the prototype is now completed. The procedure was designed to test the individual components as well as the whole prototype (for playing music etc.). Raw data on selection times, error rates etc. was collected by custom development on the Microsoft .NET platform. Additional forms were displayed on-screen in between the steps of the procedure combined with standardized form based questionnaires to gather a rich set of data.

A more subjective approach was taken during the usage of the prototype as a whole to capture the aspects which could not be confined by automatic data collection or forms. Simply by observing participants and asking simple questions in normal spoken language. While perhaps being less scientifically valid this type of information is very valuable for understanding how the users think and react. Information that is crucial for improving the design for the next iteration. There is sometimes a difference the results gained by verbal utterance, questionnaires and measurable performance. For example, interfaces can be very efficient and fast but at the same time extremely demanding and stressful. Just measuring one performance factor would not tell the whole story.

This is why I chosen to use several methods to combine raw performance data, form based questionnaires and unconstrained verbal interviewing. Hoping that it can provide multiple aspects with potential for gathering a rich source of data.

For the evaluation I used a basic on-screen demographic form gathering age, sex, computer experience, conditions of vision etc. In-between the evaluation of the individual components I used the NASA Task Load Index as a quick reflection form and at the end of the session I handed out both a IBM Computer Usability Satisfaction Questionnaire and a Q.U.I.S Generic User Interface Questionnaire. The only modification I performed was to remove a few questions that would not apply to my prototype (why ask about help pages when the prototype contains none)

I´ve found the 230 Tips and Tricks for Better Usability Testing guide to be really useful and should be read by anyone conduction HCI evaluation.

Questionnaires used in my evaluation, in PDF format:

• Basic demographics (implemented on-screen, multiple pages)
• NASA Task Load Index (on-screen using sliders)
• IBM Computer Usability Satisfaction Questionnaire
• QUIS User Interface Questionnaire

SWAET Conference

The first day of the SWAET 2008 conference at Lund University was filled with interesting presentations and inspiring conversations. Finally I had a chance to meet some of the researchers that I´ve know mainly by their publications and last names.

From the schedule of day one three talks stand out in the field of gaze interaction. These are recorded on video with the intention of future online distribution. For now enjoy these papers.

• Javier San Agustin Lopez, Julio C. Mateo and John Paulin Hanse. Hands-free selection by Combining Gaze and EMG

• Henrik H. T. Skovsgaard, and John Paulin Hansen. Zoom selection by gaze

• Yvonne Kammerer, Katharina Scheiter, Wolfgang Beinhauer. The impact of menu design and multimodal input on gaze-based menu selection

The conference was attended by three manufacturers, SMI, SmartEye and Tobii which all had systems on display.

The SMI system demonstrated was brought up from the dark dungeons of the lab to host the prototype I have been working on for the last couple of months. In general, it was well received and served its purpose of a eye catching demonstration of my "next-gen" gaze interface. To sum up it was great to get out there to gather feedback confirming that I´m on the right track. (doubts sometimes rise when working solo) The day ended with a a lovely dinner at the university´s finest dining hall.

Big thank you goes out to Kenneth Holmqvist, Jana Holsanova, Philip Diderichsen, Nils Holmberg, Richard Andersson and Janna Spanne for hosting this event.

Open invitation to participate in the evaluation

The invitation to participate in the evaluation of the prototype is out. If you have the possibility to participate I would be most thankful for your time. The entire test takes roughly 30 minutes.

The invitation can be downloaded as pdf.

If you wish to participate send me a message. Thank you.

More information on the procedure and structure of the evaluation as well as gained experience will be posted once the testing is completed. The final results will be published in my master thesis by the end of May. Stay tuned.

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..