ETRA 2018

Vision depends on motion: we see things either because they move or because our eyes do. What may be more surprising is that large and miniature eye motions help us examine the world in similar ways - largely at the same time. In this presentation, I will discuss recent research from my lab and others suggesting that exploration and gaze-fixation are not all that different processes in the brain. Our eyes scan visual scenes with a same general strategy whether the images are huge or tiny, or even when we try to fix our gaze. These findings indicate that exploration and fixation are not fundamentally different behaviors, but rather two ends of the same visual scanning continuum. They also imply that the same brain systems control our eye movements when we explore and when we fixate - an insight that may ultimately offer clues to understanding both normal oculomotor function in the healthy brain, and oculomotor dysfunction in neurological disease.

The measurement, analysis, and use of human gaze has a long history in various academic disciplines and in industry but has long been limited to special application domains or user groups. Driven by the recent commercial breakthrough of virtual and augmented reality technology, as well as the advent of affordable stationary and head-mounted eye trackers, gaze interfaces are on the verge to finally become available in a wide range of consumer applications and to be used by millions of users on a daily basis. These latest advances pose an important question - what is next?

In my talk I will argue for a new frontier in eye tracking research: The development of pervasive attentive user interfaces that sense, analyse, and adapt to users' gaze in all explicit and implicit interactions that users perform with machines in everyday life. These new interfaces will go far beyond current interfaces that still require (partly) controlled environments, that assume gaze input to be deliberately triggered by users, that often consider the point of gaze as the only gaze characteristic, and that are geared to temporary interactions. Pervasive attentive user interfaces promise exciting new applications that, for example, sense gaze robustly, accurately, and seamlessly across arbitrary devices and systems, that analyse gaze behaviour continuously over long periods of time in daily life, and that combine gaze with other input modalities to enable truly natural, intuitive, and expressive interactions with machines.

Over the past decade, eye tracking has shed light onto aspects of learning and instruction that could not have been addressed otherwise before. However, few of these insights have found their way to educational practice. To bridge this gap between this fundamental research and educational practice, we now must take a step from controlled laboratory settings towards real-life scenarios accounting for their full complexity.

In my keynote, I would like to address this question from three perspectives, namely by using eye tracking to analyze the viewpoint of the teacher as well as that of the student, and by using eye tracking as direct instruction tool. From the teacher’s perspective, I will focus on how teachers develop visual expertise in managing a classroom full of students and how this can be investigated by eye tracking (and other triangulating measures). From the students’ perspective, I will discuss how eye tracking can help us to improve the instructional design of computer-based learning- and testing environments and what influence social presence has on students’ attentional processes and ultimately on their learning. Finally, I will present how we use eye tracking directly for teaching by means of so-called eye movement modeling examples, which is a form of video-based instruction, and what guidelines we can derive thus far for their design.

For all three aspects, I will draw connections to other areas of eye tracking research to show what we learned from them and described what theoretical development our research aims at.