
Eye Tracking vs. Mouse Tracking - bkrausz
http://www.gazehawk.com/blog/eye-tracking-vs-mouse-tracking/
======
forcer
I would be really really interested how Gazehawk is doing the webcam
eyetracking. Last year I decided to pivot my usabilitytest.com business to do
exactly what they are doing now. I have been testing / researching / combining
different eye-tracking and head-tracking algorithms/APIs etc. I must say for
an engineer it was an ultimate challenge. However, after 3 months of working
on it I realized this is too much for me and I called it quits. I managed to
get eye-tracking working using 2 webcams (one front to monitor head-movement
and one small near the eye to monitor eye movement). Unfortunately, because of
the nature of eye reflection I had to work in complete darkness and use IR
light to illuminate the eye - you can't call it non-intrusive method.

So I am very happy that guys at GazeHawk cracked this and launched the service
that I really wanted to do and offer people low-cost eyetracking method.

~~~
jgershen
I pointed at some of the general techniques we use on Quora:
[http://www.quora.com/GazeHawk/What-broad-computer-vision-
tec...](http://www.quora.com/GazeHawk/What-broad-computer-vision-techniques-
does-GazeHawk-use-for-gaze-tracking)

> for an engineer it was an ultimate challenge

You won't find any argument from me; eye-tracking is extremely hard stuff to
do correctly and reliably. There are many things that I still want to do to
improve our implementation, but can't find the time to write.

(Insert a shameless request for interested readers to send me their resumes
here!)

~~~
Kliment
Just emailed you.

~~~
forcer
you emailed me? I didn't receive anything. I am not sure where you got my
email but here it is: jezowicz at gmail

~~~
Kliment
Not you - jgershen. But I can email you as well if you like. I've been working
on some eyetracking stuff and find it fun and interesting.

------
gojomo
Has anyone tried fuzzing out content further from the mouse pointer -- perhaps
with semi-transparent images or new CSS/canvas capabilities -- so that users
have to move the mouse near what they're reading, thus making mouse position
(for testing purposes) better model gaze?

~~~
qq66
You'll get bad data. If you put a piece of content to the side in a blurred-
out box for testing, people may very well go investigate it -- unblur it and
they ignore it entirely.

~~~
wlievens
You can probably account for that by timing how long your mouse was near that
area, no?

You'll have to re-blur the areas when you leave them of course so that the
reader goes back to the other content.

~~~
qq66
Maybe - the only way to confirm that the timing is an effective proxy is to
use eye tracking :)

------
hkuo
If I don't have to, why should I choose only one or the other? Ideally, I'd
love to have access to both sets of studies for my websites.

I would assume that eye tracking is mainly for looking at content and secondly
for looking for next actions, while mouse movement would be primarily for
locating next actions and secondarily for interacting with content.

------
sliverstorm
I can personally attest that my mouse and my eyes are only very loosely
correlated, maybe 50% at best.

(Much of the time I am using hotkeys, and when I am actually using the mouse
it is often flitting around in my peripheral vision where I can see it but
don't focus on it)

~~~
prawn
I often move my mouse pointer out of the way so it's not distracting me.
Surely that wouldn't be too uncommon?

~~~
iaskwhy
When I'm reading Hacker News my eyes are on the comments, the mouse pointer is
on the left or right side so it isn't causing any distraction. I do it all the
time. Sometimes I also highlight what I'm reading, mainly if I'm multitasking
and it's a long text, I want to know where I started last time I lost focus on
the text.

~~~
prawn
Re: highlighting, I do the exact same thing. Has always made me wonder about
an add-on or something that could handle that in a way that gave it advantages
over the highlighting method?

Then again, highlighting is low-tech, easy enough and works fine. Maybe I'm
looking for an idea that isn't there.

------
gcb
Biggest flaw of eye tracking like this is that it's hard to get ppl in the
200k yr to participate.

With mouse tracking just need to bring them to my web site.

Of course, I understand how better eye tracking is. But I'm not talking about
that here.

~~~
bkrausz
A good point. Interestingly enough, around a quarter of our testers make >
$90k/yr. We don't break it down more than that (and I don't know how active
they are in actually testing), but I suspect it was because of interest in the
new technology rather than actual desire to make money (even if we do pay
well).

