Visual Analytics of Gaze Data with Standard Multimedia Player

Abstract

With the increasing number of studies, where participants’ eye movements are tracked while watching videos, the volume of gaze data records is growing tremendously. Unfortunately, in most cases, such data are collected in separate files in custom-made or proprietary data formats. These data are difficult to access even for experts and effectively inaccessible for non-experts. Normally expensive or custom-made software is necessary for their analysis. We address this problem by using existing multimedia container formats for distributing and archiving eye-tracking and gaze data bundled with the stimuli data. We define an exchange format that can be interpreted by standard multimedia players and can be streamed via the Internet. We convert several gaze data sets into our format, demonstrating the feasibility of our approach and allowing to visualize these data with standard multimedia players. We also introduce two VLC player add-ons, allowing for further visual analytics. We discuss the benefit of gaze data in a multimedia container and explain possible visual analytics approaches based on our implementations, converted datasets, and first user interviews.