Colloquium Cognitive Systems

Eye Tracking and Visualization

Prof. Dr. Daniel Weiskopf (VIS, University of Stuttgart)

Abstract:  There is much interest in eye tracking as a research method and technology in many communities, including the visualization research community, but also in computer graphics, human-computer interaction, or psychology. Progress in hardware and the reduction of costs for eye tracking devices have made this analysis technique accessible to a large population of researchers. Recording the observer’s gaze can reveal how dynamic graphical displays are visually accessed and which information are being processed. However, the analysis and visualization of spatiotemporal gaze data become challenging factors in this emerging discipline. I discuss the relationship between eye tracking and visualization from two angles: (1) How can visualization facilitate the analysis of gaze recordings? (2) And how can eye tracking help understand how users work with visualization systems?  

Bio: Daniel Weiskopf is a professor and co-director of the Visualization Research Center (VISUS) and acting director of the Institute for Visualization and Interactive Systems (VIS), both at the University of Stuttgart, Germany. He received his Dr. rer. nat. (PhD) degree in physics from the University of Tübingen, Germany (2001), and the Habilitation degree in computer science at the University of Stuttgart, Germany (2005). His research interests include information and scientific visualization, visual analytics, eye tracking, computer graphics, and special and general relativity. He is spokesperson of the DFG-funded Collaborative Research Center SFB/Transregio 161 “Quantitative Methods for Visual Computing” (www.sfbtrr161.de), which includes eye tracking as a quantification approach, and he is co-initiator of the workshop series on Eye Tracking and Visualization (ETVIS, www.etvis.org), technical program co-chair of ACM ETRA 2020, and full paper co-chair of ACM ETRA 2021 and ACM ETRA 2022.