Eye Tracking Research 1: My Personal Eye Tracking Lab
I assembled a personal eye tracking study kit to conduct simple eye tracking experiments for my research in multimedia learning. When I create a multimedia instructional material, I follow the design guidelines to direct a learner's attention to what's important in the material, but I can only assume that learners will be paying attention to the pertinent parts of the material, and the question still remains:
- Are they actually paying attention to the things I want them to pay attention to?
The Eye Tracking Device: The EyeTribe
Among the currently available consumer level eye trackers, this $99 eye tracker stood out for its 60Hz sampling rate, which I believe is adequate for tracking gaze paths and fixation time for multimedia research and language studies. You may say, "Is the EyeTribe really any good for research?" I think it is. For more information about its reliability, refer to this paper by Edwin Dalmaijer.
I also intend to have my students use eye tracking as a part of learning multimedia design. At home I use Widows, but at work I only have access to Mac computers. The fact that the EyeTribe works on both Windows and Mac while the other competitors work on Windows only was another reason I chose the EyeTribe over other competitor trackers.
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Cloud-Based Eye Tracking Analytics: EyeProof
Among the currently available opensource and free eye tracking analysis applications, I chose EyeProof developed by the EyeTribe company. One of the deciding factors was that it is cloud-based, which means that I can access it anytime and anywhere and that I don't have to fiddle with installing and configuring an opensource package.
It is a free, full-featured eye tracking analysis package comparable to many commercial-grade analytics which cost $600-2,000. What's the catch? It's currently only available for the customers who purchased the EyeTribe. Since I purchased the EyeTribe and wanted to have easy access to the analysis software, it was an easy choice to make.
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My Eye Tracking Studies
Many questions can be examined and answered through eye tracking studies. Some of the questions I am most concerned about at the moment include:
- When designing a vocabulary video, where should I display the spelling of the word to increase its visibility?
- When designing a vocabulary video, where should I display an example sentence to increase its visibility and prevent the split attention effect?
- When designing a vocabulary video, will a talking head and other visual elements compete for attention?
- While watching a vocabulary video, will viewers look at the mouth of a speaker to learn how to pronounce the target word? If they do, what will be the best way to show the mouth movement?