Method for Automatic Mapping of Eye Tracker Data to Hypermedia Content

Came across the United States Patent Application 20100295774 which has been filed by Craig Hennessey of Mirametrix. Essentially the system creates Regions Of Interest based on the HTML code (div-tags) to do an automatic mapping between gaze X&Y and the location of elements. This is done by accessing the Microsoft Document Object Model of an Intenet Explorer browser page to establish the "content tracker", a piece of software that generates the list of areas, their sizes and location on-screen which then are tagged with keywords (e.g logo, ad etc) This software will also keep track of several browser windows, their position and interaction state. 

"A system for automatic mapping of eye-gaze data to hypermedia content utilizes high-level content-of-interest tags to identify regions of content-of-interest in hypermedia pages. User's computers are equipped with eye-gaze tracker equipment that is capable of determining the user's point-of-gaze on a displayed hypermedia page. A content tracker identifies the location of the content using the content-of-interest tags and a point-of-gaze to content-of-interest linker directly maps the user's point-of-gaze to the displayed content-of-interest. A visible-browser-identifier determines which browser window is being displayed and identifies which portions of the page are being displayed. Test data from plural users viewing test pages is collected, analyzed and reported."

To conclude the idea is to have multiple clients equipped with eye trackers that communicates with a server. The central machine coordinates studies and stores the gaze data from each session (in the cloud?). Overall a strategy that makes perfect sense if your differentiating factor is low-cost.