Wearable Gaze Trackers: Mapping Visual Attention in 3D

The study of visual attention in humans relates to a wide range of areas such as: psychology, cognition, usability, and marketing. These studies have been limited to fixed setups with respondents sitting in front of a monitor mounted with a gaze tracking device. The introduction of wearable mobile gaze trackers allows respondents to move freely in any real world 3D environment, removing the previous restrictions.
In this paper we propose a novel approach for processing visual attention of respondents using mobile wearable gaze trackers in a 3D environment. The pipeline consists of 3 steps: modeling the 3D area-of-interest, positioning the gaze tracker in 3D space, and 3D mapping of visual attention.
The approach is general, but as a case study we created 3D heat maps of respondents visiting supermarket shelves as well as finding their in-store movement relative to these shelves. The method allows for analysis across multiple respondents and to distinguish between phases of in-store orientation (far away) and product recognition/selection (up close) based on distance to shelves.