GazeSync: A Mobile Eye-Tracking Tool for Analyzing Visual Attention on Dynamically Manipulated Content

TL;DR

GazeSync is a mobile eye-tracking system that accurately captures visual attention on dynamic content by synchronizing gaze data with real-time image transformations.

Contribution

It introduces a novel method to reconstruct image-relative gaze patterns during content manipulation, addressing limitations of static coordinate mapping.

Findings

GazeSync outperforms static baselines in recovering ground-truth gaze locations.

The system effectively decouples visual attention from device interactions.

Calibration drift and reconstruction fragility are identified as key challenges.

Abstract

Conventional mobile eye-tracking maps gaze to static screen coordinates, failing to capture user attention when content is dynamic. As users pinch, zoom, and rotate images, static coordinates lose their semantic meaning relative to the underlying visual content. To address this methodological gap, we present \textit{GazeSync}, a reusable mobile system that synchronizes on-device gaze estimation with real-time image transformation matrices (scale, rotation, and translation). By logging gaze coordinates alongside precise UI states, GazeSync enables the accurate reconstruction of \textit{image-relative} attention patterns, decoupling visual attention from device interaction. We validate our end-to-end toolchain through a formative study involving guided manipulation, reading, and visual search tasks. Our results demonstrate GazeSync's ability to recover ground-truth gaze locations on transforming content, explicitly showing how it outperforms static baselines, while also surfacing critical boundaries regarding calibration drift and reconstruction fragility under compound manipulations.