Today Tobii released Tobii Studio 3.0 including one the most anticipated features from the user community – Dynamic Areas of Interest (AOI).

The new AOI tool

Most eye tracking researchers and practitioners are well aware of the importance of AOIs in quantitative eye tracking analysis studies. Using AOIs, researchers define areas of particular interests in stimuli to calculate eye tracking metrics such as how long and how often test subjects looked at the area of interest.

Tobii Studio 3.0 features a completely new AOI tool that allows users to define AOIs in both static and dynamic content. Thus, users are now able to get the same eye tracking metrics in videos, screen captures and Tobii Glasses recordings as in static images.

Tobii Studio users from different fields and research areas will find the new Dynamic AOIs very useful in their daily eye tracking related work. For example, behavioral researchers using videos to study infant anticipatory actions can use AOIs to code dynamic elements in the video; usability researchers can track and calculate eye tracking metrics of dynamic elements in web sites with dynamic content and market researchers studying shopper attitude and behavior using the Tobii Glasses can use dynamic AOIs to complement the use of IR markers (i.e. when the test subject moves outside the range of the IR markers).

For more information about the new AOI tool, watch Tobii Studio 3.0 Highlight movie at the end of this post.

Data Export
Tobii Studio 3.0 also features a brand new tool to export the “raw” data. The focus for the new Data Export tool has been workflow efficiency – i.e. to enable users to select, customize and quickly export large amounts of data.

One first example of this is the new way to select the data set to export. In the new Data Export tool, users can now chose the exported data set in three ways; full recordings, segments from recordings or medias. When exporting media, only the data from recordings that contain the selected media will be exported.

Another great improvement is the way the data types are all grouped into relevant sections to give the user a quick and easy overview of the data to export. Additionally, all data types are clearly defined in the user interface, allowing for a fast selection of the data types to export.

But maybe the most powerful feature of the new Data Export tool is the ability to save and load settings. The settings are the selections made for what data types to export and what formatting alternatives, such as exporting to one single file or multiple files, to apply. Tobii Studio also ships with a set of pre-defined settings.

Studio Remote Viewer
The last major new feature of Tobii Studio 3.0 is the new Studio Remote Viewer. The focus here has been on improving the stability of the video feed over the local network. The new Studio Remote Viewer features a completely new user interface with among other things a buffer indicator that indicates the bandwidth of the network and hence the quality and performance of the video stream.

Checkout this video for a demonstration of the highlights of Tobii Studio 3.0

Johan Koch, Product Manager, Tobii Technology

 

Most usability researchers are familiar with Morae from TechSmith and many use Morea on a regular basis in their  daily work. Tobii now launches a free of charge plug-in to Morae that enables integration of eye tracking data in Morae studies. Eye tracking brings another dimension to usability studies in Morae; researchers can combine events logged in Morae with gaze trails to much better understand user behavior. The plug-in enables recording of eye tracking data from any Tobii T/X series eye tracker into Morae Recorder. Export and replay your recordings in Morae Manager with eye tracking data overlaid.

To visualize the participant’s gaze trail is often a powerful way to illustrate usability test results and to emphasize your findings towards different stakeholders.

Download the plug-in for free – http://www.tobii.com/en/eye-tracking-research/global/products/software/tobii-plug-in-for-morae/

 

Johan Koch, Product Manager, Tobii Technology

In 20 years eye tracking will be an integrated part of our everyday lives, making things easier, faster, safer and more fun. I’ll give you a few examples.

When a computer knows where you are looking it can support you in reading and learning. Translations, word explanations and pronunciations appear when you need them and you even get help in finding your way back to the last sentence read or in skimming, as illustrated in the project Text 2.0.

When a computer knows where you are looking information access can become hands-free. Computer interaction gets more flexible in personal computers, public information kiosks, and in places where it’s even more needed, such as surgery rooms, where timely access to information, maintaining the sterile environment and multi-tasking is critical.

When a computer knows where you are looking it can support you in critical processes. Multiple screens can be overviewed from one; automatic alerts warn you if critical information is overseen. This improves safety and efficiency in a range of applications, such as air traffic control, baggage scanning, medical X-ray examinations, video surveillance and industrial process control.

When a computer knows where you are looking games can become much more immersive. Just as in real life you interact with other characters simply by looking at them. Point and aim with your gaze and your controls become immediate. This takes gaming and VR one step beyond the vision outlined in GeekWire by Craig Mundie, Microsoft.

“If you get the animation of the eyes, eyebrows, face and mouth nominally correct, most of the major human emotions are accurately portrayed,” Mundie said. “You get a huge amount of cues even though you’re looking at their cartoon characters.”

Eye tracking and eye control in our everyday lives is not only our vision.

According to Rick Chin, visionary director of product innovation at SolidWorks eye tracking is one of eight technologies that will shape our future along with autonomous cars, personalized and custom products, truly smart smartphones designed as wrist watches. He states that these are technologies that will make us smarter, simplify daily tasks and seamlessly fit into our daily lives.

Chin foresees that eye tracking glasses, such as the Tobii Glasses, will evolve from being a market research tool to becoming Information Glasses used by you and me to get VR information.

Others seem to agree. The Washington Post recently published the top 10 most interesting new technologies over the last couple of years under the headline “What will we think of the next?” Eye control technology in laptops was ranked #2.

Even Gartner analyst Hung LeHong, Research Vice President for Gartner's innovation research team, has spotted eye tracking and eye control as the next big thing. According to an article in CNN International, his analysis is that the fact that users are getting used to gesture control will help the adoption of eye-tracking.

Envisioning the future really gets me going. The more I think of it the cooler it gets. The potential of eye tracking is truly everywhere but to be honest, we can’t really know for sure what applications will make it. One thing I am relatively sure of: the demand for faster, safer, more enjoyable and more comfortable computer interaction will not go away. Looking forward to get there!

Sara Hyléen

Corporate Marketing Manager

Tobii Technology

The Washington Post Business section online has made a list of great uses of technology. The Tobii eye-controlled laptop is second in the collection. Check out the list here.

More and more of our lives is managed using our mobile phones and other mobile devices. Our mobile devices such as smart phones and iPads are used for all kinds of things such as surfing on the internet, scheduling appointments, booking tickets, checking into flights, listening to music, watching TV etc. Even though the use of mobile devices is growing, the interfaces for doing all the things mentioned above is often just translated from a regular, full size computer interface. This transition does very seldom result in optimal usability. We at Tobii are not experts on how to design interfaces for small screens so that part of the problem is not something we can help to solve. What we do know is how to do usability tests on mobile interfaces in general and how to integrate eye tracking in such tests in particular.

As we want to share our knowledge about how to use eye tracking to test mobile interfaces, we arrange a tutorial on the 30th of August at Mobile HCI 2011 which is held in Stockholm between the 30th of August and 2nd of September. In the tutorial we aim to give an introduction into how eye tracking works, how it can be used when studying interfaces on mobile devices such as mobile phones and what the limitations are. In the tutorial four different hardware setups (including the new mobile device testing solution mentioned in the previous blog post) that can be used when studying eye movements during interaction with mobile devices will be introduced. We will talk about the data you get from doing an eye tracking study, what to consider when choosing setup, but also give some general pointers on what to think about when doing eye tracking studies with mobile devices.

In order to participate in the tutorial, you need to be registered both for the tutorial and at least one day of the conference. The early bird registration ends at the 12th of June. Read more about and register for the conference here.

 

Surfing the web, reading the news, sharing what you`re doing on Facebook or Twitter, killing time playing Angry Birds or navigating your way around town– more and more of these activities are done using small screen devices: smart phones, tablet PCs, e-readers, navigation devices or game consoles. In this highly competitive market of mobile devices, good usability is often the key to success. Gaining more insight in how people are using these products and how the usability can be improved is often difficult to measure with conventional usability testing methods alone.

Knowing where someone is looking can provide great context to their actions. Eye tracking small devices has always been a challenge met with various offerings from eye tracking companies, including Tobii. Solutions like emulator setups or head mounted eye trackers have their pro-s and con-s; on which we based our development of a new product, which provides a better allround solution, eliminating many problems that have made eye tracking mobile devices difficult in the past. 

The Tobii Mobile Device Stand offers never-before-seen precision of eye tracking data and high quality video output combined with ease of use as a test leader and unobtrusive interaction for participants. Using our most flexible eye tracker, the Tobii X60 or X120, on this stand you will be able to distinguish a participants´ gaze between even the smallest icons on mobile devices. The Live Viewing functionality allows you to follow the users gaze in real time as they complete a task and prepare questions that can be used in a Retrospective Think Aloud interview.

Check out this video we did to see the eye gaze on a HD scene camera output. The participant was looking for a hotel in New York, but as he was an iPhone user he had some trouble using the Tripadvisor app on an Android mobile phone as the app does not have a Back button and relies on the hardware buttons of the phone instead. The participant is looking around for a Back button -where does he expect this button to be? His gaze gives us the answer!

 

 When designing the stand we also focused on enabling natural user interaction as well as quick and efficient test setups. Another important feature we included is the possibility for aggregating data from multiple participants to enable you to create visualizations such as heat maps or gaze plots and calculate statistics.

For more info, visit our webpage.

Today Tobii uncovered a project that we have been working on for some time in collaboration with the computer manufacturer Lenovo. The project is a laptop with an integrated eye tracker. As a part of this project we have developed integration with the traditional Windows 7 interface. By combing the regular interaction using the mouse and keyboard with the information from gaze data, common tasks such as moving the mouse over the screen or selecting active windows gets much more efficient and seamless for the user.

The eye tracking laptop is currently not produced as a consumer product, but rather as a proof of concept. If using a comparison with the car industry, our eye tracking laptop is a concept car which shows how regular computers might work in the (hopefully near) future. It shows how eye tracking can be integrated into everyday objects to enhance and simplify the user experience. It also highlights that the price for eye trackers is going down so it will probably not take long before you will actually find eye tracking built into laptops or other devices where it might be beneficial.

As an employee at Tobii I often get involved in discussions where people from outside of the company comes up with more or less fanciful ideas of how and when eye control can be used. Using it in a laptop is only a start. Research in this field is ongoing both here at Tobii as well as within academia. As an exciting new future of gaze control is coming, it is important to share the knowledge collected so far regarding best practices in gaze control and gaze interaction. To facilitate such knowledge sharing, I, in corporation with Albrecht Schmidt at University Duisburg-Essen, Paul Marshall at University of Warwick and Veronica Sundstedt at Blekinge Institute of Technology will be moderating a Special Interest Group meeting at CHI 2011 in Vancouver in May (http://chi2011.org/) on the subject of “Using Eye Tracking for Interaction”. If you are attending CHI, feel come by and contribute to the discussion.

If you happen to miss the opportunity to attend the SIG at CHI2011 and you are interested in academic research within the subject of gaze interaction and gaze control, there will be a conference held in Karlskrona, Sweden in the end of May on the topic “Novel Gaze-Controlled Applications“ (http://www.bth.se/ngca2011).

If you own a Tobii Eye tracker and want to start developing gaze controlled interactions, I suggest you download our Software Development Kit. Some inspiration can be found in our app-market.

Read this case study " It's all in the eyes", where Ipsos Sweden describes how eye-tracking helped Carlsberg understand how pub customers pick their drinks. http://www.research-live.com/magazine/case-study-its-all-in-the-eyes/4004622.article

During the last five years Tobii Remote Eye Tracker’s have become very popular, especially among Psychologists, Market Researchers and Usability consultants.

With this 300 Hz Eye Tracker Tobii now enters the High/Midspeed eye tracking arena. So what is now possible with a Tobii TX300 that has not been possible with for example a Tobii T60 Eye Tracker?

Quite a lot, take for instance the fact that you can change within minutes from a screen based eye tracking setup to real scene stimuli/Widescreen TV/projector setup, just by removing the screen and using the TX300 as a standalone Eye Tracker. 

Another great thing is the TX300´s low noise levels of less than 0,05 degrees that allow to track small regression saccades that you would have missed with lower speed Eye Trackers. This has a great value for basically any Eye Tracking Researcher with advanced data quality demands. Also consider studying of Saccades, Eye Tracking Researchers using lower speed systems might not aware that Saccades are actually bent for example. Tobii TX300 data can now show you these curves quite accurately. Or think about Gaze contingency experiments where the Stimuli changes in real time depending on the participants´ gaze. The TX300 needs less than 10 ms to get the gaze position to the application software. This is approximately three times faster than a Tobii T60!

The Hardware Package is very complete,  the core is a dual sensor system, both running at 300 Hz, each spitting out one gaze sample each 3,33 micro seconds, with an impressive reliability. The 23" screen that is included perfectly fits the eye tracker and also features a built-in a user cam. 

As far as we know, this is the only Eye Tracker that allows you to study Microsaccades during true free motion head movements, without the need for a chin rest, giving higher validity to your research.

Who knows, maybe scientists will discover completely new things for example babies having double the amount of Microsaccades below the age of 24 months or whenever humans tell a lie their Microsaccades are more horizontal than vertical, and perhaps always followed by three blinks? J 

Even if in the years to come hypotheses like the ones above will be proven wrong: If free head movements and advanced data quality is of importance, it seems that the TX300 is the best Eye Tracker money can buy at this point in time. 

More information about the Tobii TX300: 

http://www.tobii.com/scientific_research/products_services/eye_tracking_hardware/tobii_tx300_eye_tracker.aspx

Besides creating the TX300, an eye tracker that meets the high demand of scientific researchers, Tobii has done a lot more to support the scientific community and provide them with tools for any researcher that is interested in using eye tracking in their studies or experiments.

Tobii recently launched the Tobii Application market for example, which allows researchers to share software applications that work together with Tobii eye trackers. This market will only grow in the future and provide more and more unique solutions for using eye tracking in every possible way imagined by the community.

Learn more about the Tobii Application Market: 

http://www.tobii.com/scientific_research/products_services/eye_tracking_software/application_market_for_tobii_eye_trackers.aspx  

Using the new free Tobii SDK, researchers can create their own applications and communicate with Tobii Eye Trackers. 

The Tobii SDK is available for free download from Tobii.com: 

http://www.tobii.com/scientific_research/products_services/eye_tracking_software/tobii_software_development_kit.aspx

The Tobii SDK can also be combined with the newly released Tobii Toolbox for MATLAB for Tobii eye trackers, allowing researchers full test design and communication with Tobii Eye Trackers along with extensive tools for analysis of Tobii eye tracking data, all straight from MATLAB.

Find out more about the Tobii Toolbox for MATLAB:

 http://www.tobii.com/scientific_research/products_services/eye_tracking_software/tobii_toolbox_for_matlab.aspx 

Furthermore, in the last year we have created an extensive public library of scientific research papers that included the use of Tobii Eye Trackers. We have so far already collected over 500 articles and the list is still growing! This library helps researchers find out how other researchers have been using Tobii Eye Trackers to conduct their studies, learn more about their findings and experimental design or methodologies they used.

To find out how to use Tobii´s Scientific Research Paper Library and quickly start finding scientific articles that are relevant to you, please visit: 

http://www.tobii.com/scientific_research/case_studies/research_papers/research_papers.aspx 

We hope these new products and tools will help to keep Tobii Eye Trackers the most advanced and flexible eye trackers for any researcher now and in the future.

 

 

Tobii's annual EyeTrackAwards competition recognizes research and projects that have generated new knowledge and insight by using eye tracking technology. Findings from eligible projects must have been published in writing in a journal, book, as a conference paper, or similar. The competition is open to everyone regardless of research field, country, eye tracking equipment used, or affiliation; as long as eye tracking technology has been utilized substantially in the project.

The deadline for this year’s competition was on September 30th. We are pleased to announce that we received 30 high-quality nominations from 14 different countries.  The accepted papers represent a very wide range of research fields, covering topics from child development to pupil tracking sensors. The reviewing process has now begun and will be conducted both internally at Tobii and by external experts in their respective fields. We expect this process to take a few months, meaning that the winner will be announced earliest at the end of this year (2010). Each project will be judged based on contribution, quality, and uniqueness, and the winner of the EyeTrackAwards will receive a prize of 5 000 EUR.

A list of the accepted nominations including short abstracts and links to the full papers is available on the EyeTrackAwards website: www.eyetrackawards.com