iTrace: Click-Based Gaze Visualization on the Apple Vision Pro

TL;DR

iTrace is a click-based gaze visualization tool for Apple Vision Pro that overcomes privacy restrictions, enabling detailed attention analysis through manual and automatic click methods with high gaze accuracy.

Contribution

The paper introduces iTrace, a novel system that extracts gaze data via click-based methods on Apple Vision Pro, providing dynamic heatmaps despite privacy restrictions.

Findings

Higher data collection rate with gaming controller (14.22 clicks/sec) compared to dwell control (0.45 clicks/sec).

Heatmaps reveal distinct attention patterns in different tasks.

Gaze accuracy maintained at 91%.

Abstract

The Apple Vision Pro is equipped with accurate eye-tracking capabilities, yet the privacy restrictions on the device prevent direct access to continuous user gaze data. This study introduces iTrace, a novel application that overcomes these limitations through click-based gaze extraction techniques, including manual methods like a pinch gesture, and automatic approaches utilizing dwell control or a gaming controller. We developed a system with a client-server architecture that captures the gaze coordinates and transforms them into dynamic heatmaps for video and spatial eye tracking. The system can generate individual and averaged heatmaps, enabling analysis of personal and collective attention patterns. To demonstrate its effectiveness and evaluate the usability and performance, a study was conducted with two groups of 10 participants, each testing different clicking methods. The 8BitDo controller achieved higher average data collection rates at 14.22 clicks/s compared to 0.45 clicks/s with dwell control, enabling significantly denser heatmap visualizations. The resulting heatmaps reveal distinct attention patterns, including concentrated focus in lecture videos and broader scanning during problem-solving tasks. By allowing dynamic attention visualization while maintaining a high gaze precision of 91 %, iTrace demonstrates strong potential for a wide range of applications in educational content engagement, environmental design evaluation, marketing analysis, and clinical cognitive assessment. Despite the current gaze data restrictions on the Apple Vision Pro, we encourage developers to use iTrace only in research settings.