EyeLiveMetrics: Real-time Analysis of Online Reading with Eye Tracking

TL;DR

EyeLiveMetrics is a browser plugin that enables real-time, fine-grained analysis of online reading behavior by mapping eye tracking data directly to webpage text, facilitating immediate insights for research and applications.

Contribution

The paper introduces EyeLiveMetrics, a novel browser plugin that links raw gaze data to webpage text in real time, allowing instant calculation of reading metrics unlike existing tools.

Findings

Effective real-time mapping of gaze to text.

Improved accuracy in reading metric computation.

Potential for live reading behavior analysis.

Abstract

Existing eye tracking software have certain limitations, especially with respect to monitoring reading online: (1) Most eye tracking software record eye tracking data as raw coordinates and stimuli as screen images/videos, but without inherent links between both. Analysts must draw areas of interest (AOIs) on webpage text for more fine-grained reading analysis. (2) The computation and analysis of fixation and reading metrics are done after the experiment and thus cannot be used for live applications. We present EyeLiveMetrics, a browser plugin that automatically maps raw gaze coordinates to text in real time. The plugin instantly calculates, stores, and provides fixation, saccade, and reading measures on words and paragraphs so that gaze behavior can be analyzed immediately. We also discuss the results of a comparative evaluation. EyeLiveMetrics offers a flexible way to measure reading on the web - for research experiments and live applications.