Naghmeh Shafiei (featured in photo) from SensoMotric Instruments did really cool demos on eye tracking techniques for us at UX Eye meetup today. I’m happy that I had a chance to play with the glasses!

The glasses

It was great to see how eye movements were tracked. The glasses have a number of sensors to track the pupils and mark them on screen. You can wear them when you are riding, driving and shopping, depending on research purposes. I’m wearing eyeglasses and seems this gave the eye tracking glasses some hard time to calibrate, but it should be fine for a person who wears contact lenses.

Eye tracking device for computer screen

This device helps to track eye movements when a participant is using a computer. This made me think of usertesting.com, a platform that specializes in online usability testings with video recording. To make usability testing results (for web/mobile app) more accurate, combining usage video, mouse and eye tracking should be an interesting idea, although I think this would be very expensive.

The demos were fascinating. When it’s time for improving a product (mobile app, cars etc.), usage data like these can be really useful. It’s always good to know how people use a product: what needs to be improved and what goes completely wrong.

Eye tracking is expensive and mostly used in Psychology and Neuroscience researches. Research teams in some large technology companies may have already adopted it to improve user experience, hopefully at some point, smaller companies will start using it as well.

I really enjoyed this event tonight. Come to UX Eye meetup to learn great stuff if you are a designer in San Francisco!