Introduction
Whether your goal is to advance academic research or to increase commercial value and performance, eye tracking gives you valuable insights into the human mind. It’s an unobtrusive method to gain information about the visual attention of users.
Eye tracking makes it possible to determine what users are looking at, and similarly, what they are not looking at, allowing analysis of why people make certain decisions, whether conscious or subconscious. This also allows us to study the attention of users and get a glimpse into what people are feeling and thinking.
Although each use case is different, in the fundamentals section we have gathered general information that can be applied to a variety of analytical use cases.
Choosing a Platform
Depending on your use case, there are a large numbers of platforms to work with. In this section we will focus on VR devices integrating Tobii eye tracking. However, there are many other platforms and formfactors to work with such as Tobii Pro Glasses, Tobii Pro Fusion and Tobii Pro Nano.
Repeatability: Virtual scenarios can be repeated infinitely, with great variability. In contrast, repeating real-world scenarios can be costly, time-consuming, and difficult to control the variables between sessions.
Realism: The VR industry is getting closer to recreating the visual fidelity of the real world. However, this is limited to headset specifications like resolution, and VR is missing the physical/tactile qualities of the real-world. AR and Tobii Pro Glasses have the benefit of capturing eye tracking data in the real-world with all its visual, tactile and auditory realism.
Cost: For VR, the average cost of developing analytical applications and cost of headsets are low compared to other options because of cheaper hardware and lower iteration costs. Mapping of objects and user actions can also be automated on these platforms. AR and Tobii Pro Glasses studies may cost more due to the cost of hardware, time needed to repeat real-world scenarios, and time needed to annotate real-world objects and user actions.
Risk: VR allows risky/hazardous scenarios to be replicated virtually without consequences, which makes it particularly well-suited to high-risk scenarios that require people to be trained in a safe setting.
Trackability: Head-mounted eye trackers are able to accurately track the eyes no matter where the user is looking, whereas desktop eye trackers have a limited tracking region.
Tobii VR Offering
Tobii eye tracking has currently been integrated into two VR headsets:
To help you get started, we have gathered resources on this website like design guidelines, analytical best practices, eye tracking knowledge, showcases in form of prototypes and demos as well as code examples.
You can also contact us for commercial inquiries.