Okay, now that we're back sitting comfortably, I want to ask, get some experiences, and some greater in-depth information about practical uses of eye tracking, where it's going, what's happening in the research lab. Maybe we should just take a pass through and hear about what people's experiences are. >> Sure. So early on with the eye tracking there was a lot of interested with doing big eye tracking stuff because there was a thought that there would be a lot of value. Especially in a commercial aspect there were, we had a team that we worked with that was working with search results and a variety of different kinds of search results and presentations of them. And what they were hoping to find out was that if they could drive a 5% increase on clicks on a promoted kind of search result that they would make millions of dollars and whatever they spent on. Doing this study would be nothing in comparison. So some of the things that we learned, they ended up bringing in five different treatments, which we learned is too many. It's too many to compare. It's too hard to get the nuance teased out when you've got too many different versions of something. And then what they did find out is they went through this, and because, as we talked about, people aren't thinking of why it is they're going through it. When we looked at the data, as it was, there was one version that performed far better than, there was eye fixations on the searches they wanted them to look at. And the team was thinking, all right, we've got a solution here. But the thing that helped them or saved them in this instance was they did interviewing after the fact to talk with people about the different treatments of the search results. And they found out that people hated that one the most. And that they were fixating on it because they didn't know why these results were in the middle of their results. It had been placed inline in the middle of their results, and they're like, what is this doing here? I don't want it here. Get it out of here. And that's why they were looking at it. And so if they had gone with it, they very well may have alienated some of their customer base because they were putting something in the features that they had already expected that seemed manipulative. >> So a real lesson about the fact that just knowing that somebody looks at something, it doesn't tell you exactly why, it doesn't tell you whether it's a good experience. >> How they feel about it. How they reflect on it. >> Exactly. What sorts of things would people actually make decisions about from getting eye tracking data? >> Well, we've been talking a lot about display eye tracking here to look through interfaces or presenting of imagery in front of someone. But another device we've got in the back is our mobile eye tracking, it's not connected to a monitor. I can be used to collect eye tracking results on a mobile device or a physical object. One can get calibrated with it and it's easy for me to imagine applications in the real world. Let's suppose if there was a marketing agency and they were contracted to make a $20 million billboard campaign that's going to roll out nationwide. They might want to know whether someone passing by in a car will notice the name of their movie or the URL for their product. They've only got three or four seconds, right, so it would be a perfect application to set up an eye tracking study for that multimillion dollar thing before they roll that out. Another way that I've seen mobile eye trackers be used is in the arrangement of retail space. You could set up a mobile eye tracker in front of a store front or a grocery aisle, for instance. And find out with pretty good data will someone notice my packaging? Will someone notice the way that we have laid this out? Where do kids look? Where do adults look? And those things can make enormous differences in engagement and sales. >> That would be sort of cool to use in high stakes advertisements, like Super Bowl ads or movie placements of products to understand where do you have to place that product on screen for people to notice? >> Sure, eye tracking studies aren't cheap. As we mentioned, 30 participants, that's pretty rigorous. So it becomes more of a useful application when the stakes are high. >> And in my background, my background has a lot of design in it, and so the one time we used eye tracking really is in relation to that. He mentioned design space and more than designing, also redesigning, revamping an interface. An application front user interface design. Heat maps and eye tracking really help with that because you're trying to figure out how much real estate is this person actually looking at? Am I going to cover this entire website, webpage, web app with information or pictures? What's the first thing I look at? Based on that a lot of the focus was really on that big first image and the page did what got what you wanted out of it. Hoping the designers got what they wanted I've noticed the big title, the big page thing that gave you the most information short amounts of time. So how much information can you capture from this design very limited period of time I think eye tracking does a very great job at that. >> Well let's talk about other uses beyond just evaluating interfaces for a minute. >> Right I think it's interesting because what we been talking about here so far is analytic uses of eye tracking. You gather, you capture eye tracking data then designers, analysis use that. They look at it but a lot of research and development over the last number of years has been looking at eye motion as input into a system. So in the research world for example, people have looked eye motion as people are reading, and noticed when they're having trouble reading a particular word, being able to tell where they're stumbling over it. And this is great for assistive technology because you can imagine, at that point you can have the system read it out loud, say it out loud, and help the person learn what that word is. Also in the commercial world, over the last number of years a lot of the smartphone makers have been experimenting with eye motion, with tracking eye motion. For simple sorts of input. Things like scrolling through pages, or telling if somebody is still looking at the screen of a phone so they won't turn it off, even if there hasn't been any interaction with the phone. Or even doing biometric recognition by looking at your iris and considering that as a unique identifier. And this is something that's really definitely coming. Certainly, for people who are handicapped. Looking down the road. People who may not have motor skills to use their hands. And be able to use eye motion as input. To be able to select. To be able to scroll all of those things. And that's something that in the area of technical innovation is really important and emerging. >> It's been pretty clear that the idea that your hand held devices, your tablets, your laptops they've got a camera anyway, it's not going to be as good as a fancy expensive eye tracker but as I was coming in here today we were hearing hey we're already doing this. We can track things off of a device. It's not perfect but its getting better and I think that it's pretty clear evidence that it's going to keep getting better fast as these cameras and the ability to process their input gets there. And that does open up a whole realm of ideas, not only on the fly evaluation. You open up an app or a webpage and it's gathering data perhaps we hope with your permission to help improve the next design. But also dynamic interaction but it also opens up just the wide variety of applications in other domains. When you were talking about the mobile eye tracking, I remember the first mobile eye tracking I ever saw was ridiculously expensive. It was mounted on a baseball cap and its primary use was golf. They wanted to see if people were keeping their eye on the ball all the way through the contact rather than looking up prematurely and so they mounted a camera on the brim of the hat. And eye trackers looking at the eyes and would superimpose to see at what point did you stop looking at the ball. And play that back. Now, for you or me that's probably way too expensive. But if you're playing golf professionally and you can take a stroke off your game, suddenly these kinds of things have some really exciting opportunities. So, thank you for joining us as we discuss and introduce you to eye tracking. I'll give people a chance, if you have one last word to share with our learners before we go? >> Well, I hope this informed you about what you can do with eye tracking today as an analytic tool and maybe inspired you as to directions that it will be taken in the future.
