Search Results (3)

This Scoping Review (ScR) synthesizes advances in architectural eye-tracking (ET) research published between 2010 and 2024. Drawing on 75 peer-reviewed studies that met clear inclusion criteria, it monitors the field’s rapid expansion, from only 20 experiments before 2018, to more than 45 new investigations in the three years thereafter, situating these developments within the longer historical evolution of ET hardware and analytical paradigms. The review maps 13 recurrent areas of application, focusing on design evaluation, wayfinding and spatial navigation, end-user experience, and architectural education. Across these domains, ET reliably reveals where occupants focus, for how long, and in what sequence, providing objective evidence that complements designer intuition and conventional post-occupancy surveys. Experts and novices might display distinct gaze signatures; for example, architects spend longer fixating on contextual and structural cues, whereas lay users dwell on decorative details, highlighting possible pedagogical opportunities. Despite these benefits, persistent challenges include data loss in dynamic or outdoor settings, calibration drift, single-user hardware constraints, and the need to triangulate gaze metrics with cognitive or affective measures. Future research directions emphasize integrating ET with virtual or augmented reality (VR) (AR) to validate design interactively, improving mobile tracking accuracy, and establishing shared datasets to enable replication and meta-analysis. Overall, the study demonstrates that ET is maturing into an indispensable, evidence-based lens for creating more intuitive, legible, and human-centered architecture. Full article

A substantial question in understanding expert behavior is isolating where experts look, and which aspects of their environment they process. While tracking the position of gaze provides some insight into this process, our ability to attend covertly to regions of space other than the current point of fixation, severely limits the diagnostic power of such data. Over the past decade, evidence has emerged suggesting that microscopic eye movements present during periods of fixation may be linked to the spatial distribution of covert attention, potentially offering a powerful tool for studying expert behavior. To date, the majority of studies in this field have tested the link under the constraints of a trial by trial, forced-response task. In the current study we sought to examine the effect when participants performed a continuous, divided-attention task, with the hope of bridging the gap to a range of more ecological, real-world tasks. We report various aspects of the eye movement and response data including (i) the relationship between microsaccades and drift correction, (ii) response behavior in brief time periods immediately following a microsaccade, (iii) response behavior briefly preceding a microsaccade. Analysis failed to reveal a link between task accuracy and the direction of a microsaccade. Most striking however, we found evidence for a timelocked relationship between the side of space responded to and the direction of the most recent microsaccade. The paper hence provides preliminary evidence that microsaccades may indeed be used to track the ongoing allocation of spatial attention. Full article

Eyetrackers which allow for free head movements are in many cases imprecise to the extent that reading patterns become heavily distorted. The poor usability and interpretability of these gaze patterns is corroborated by a “naïve” fixation-to-symbol mapping, which often wrongly maps the possibly drifted center of the observed fixation onto the symbol directly below it. In this paper I extend this naïve fixation-to-symbol mapping by introducing background knowledge about the translation task. In a first step, the sequence of fixation-tosymbol mappings is extended into a lattice of several possible fixated symbols, including those on the line above and below the naïve fixation mapping. In a second step a dynamic programming algorithm applies a number of heuristics to find the best path through the lattice, based on the probable distance in characters, in words and in pixels between successive fixations and the symbol locations, so as to smooth the gazing path according to the background gazing model. A qualitative and quantitative evaluation shows that the algorithm increases the accuracy of the re-mapped symbol sequence. Full article