How does eye tracking work?

Light from infrared cameras is directed toward the participant’s pupils, causing reflections in both the pupil and the cornea. These reflections, otherwise known as pupil center corneal reflections (PCCR), can provide information about the movement and direction of the eyes.

Academic researchers use information about eye movements and fixations to assess attentional processes, compare group behavior, measure stimuli-induced visual responses, and more.

Leading consumer brands use eye tracking to better understand customer experience and product performance by measuring visual attention to key messages in product advertisements, placement and branding, package design, and more.

Read more: What is eye tracking and how does it work?

A Complete Eye Tracking System: Hardware & Software

For high accuracy and precision eye tracking research that generates meaningful insights, you’ll need to think about which type of eye tracker is suited to your studies and how you will analyze the collected data with software. How these systems work together will dictate the quality of your findings.

Your eye tracking system setup may be screen based for stationary studies, glasses for ambulatory, or VR eye tracking in virtual environments. iMotions software is compatible with all three.

Read more: A guide to selecting eye tracking solutions

What is Gaze Mapping?

If you want to measure visual attention to specific elements in the real world across participants with eye tracking, iMotions provides a way for dynamic visual content to be represented by a static image – this is called gaze mapping.

• iMotions computer-vision algorithm identifies representations of the reference image (left) in the recording (right).
• The software corrects for differences in distance and angle across participants and maps the gaze onto the reference image.

Read more: Gaze mapping

Eye Tracking Visualizations in the iMotions Software

iMotions allows you to use any type of stimuli for your study and enables you to intuitively visualize your study data. Work with images, video, VR environments, web content, or ‘in the wild’ setups with our core desktop lab software, which includes diverse eye tracking metrics and visualizations. Through software add-ons, you can extend the collection capabilities to also allow online remote studies and mobile data collection.

Read more: Top eye tracking metrics

Eye TrackingPDF

Webcam Eye Tracking that actually works

iMotions Online is a cloud-based tool featuring high-accuracy remote eye tracking algorithms we’ve developed in house and trained against one of the largest eye tracking data sets in the world. Conduct online studies with webcam eye tracking and add facial expression analysis together to deliver on flexibility and insights in spite of changing lighting conditions, with no extra hardware needed.

iMotions Online is the perfect companion for website and UX testing and it integrates with popular panel providers for quick deploys. Set up studies quickly and easily, and get insights from a global audience. Include screen recordings in your study and see heat maps overlaid with both individual and aggregated data. It’s all done via a browser interface, and it’s GDPR compliant.

Webcam eye tracking is also available in iMotions Lab as a module and allows for remote data collection just like iMotions Online.

Read more: iMotions Online